What My Brain Does When the Semester Is Over

The grades are in. The final was turned in weeks ago. By any reasonable measure, my brain is off the clock.

And yet. Here I am at half past midnight on the second-to-last night of the year, sitting on my bed with a notebook I didn't plan to open, a cup of tea that stopped being warm about forty minutes ago, and a pen that has crossed out more lines than it's kept. The semester ended. The Creative Writing course, the one I almost didn't take, the one I added impulsively and then spent three seconds regretting before closing the browser, it's done. And somewhere in the process of finishing it, something got loose in my head that I can't seem to settle back down.

mid-rewrite, 12am, December 2010

The last assignment asked me to name my 'primary writing practice.' I wrote 'personal essay' without thinking. Only after I hit submit did I realize I'd been sitting with that question for two years without answering it, and apparently all it took was a deadline and a text box. I'm still not entirely sure what to do with that information. It feels like it should come with instructions, and it doesn't.

So I'm writing. Not for any class. Not for a grade. Technically not even for the blog, except I'll probably post this anyway, because that's apparently what I do now. The 'not for the blog' line is its own kind of joke at this point. The notebook is full of half-sentences that aren't going anywhere and I think that's fine. Two more days until a new year, and I'm spending them like this, which honestly feels about right.