The Part Where You Say It Out Loud

It wasn't until I was standing at the rec center front desk, waiting for Sandra to finish initialing a clipboard, that I realized I had never actually told anyone about this face to face. The blog is one thing. The blog is me typing into a void at eleven pm with a mug going cold next to my keyboard. This was different. This was a real person who had watched me show up at six-thirty on dark January mornings and who was now going to write my name on an official piece of paper and send it somewhere. I'd been rehearsing what I say for twenty minutes on the walk over. I still barely got it out.

She said yes immediately. Like, before I even finished the sentence. And then she said something I wasn't expecting, she said she'd been wondering when I was going to do something like this. She didn't elaborate. I didn't ask her to. I just said thank you and wrote down the program name on a sticky note she slid across the counter and then I walked back out into the hallway and stood there for a minute because I didn't know what to do with my hands.

standing in the hallway, not quite ready to move yet

The acceptance email still hasn't come. I checked my inbox four times on the walk home, which is two more than my self-imposed limit, which I know is silly, and I'm doing it anyway. But something shifted today, or maybe it shifted when I asked Sandra, or when she said yes, or when she said she'd been waiting for me to ask, and the gap year stopped being this thing I'm quietly planning and became a thing that exists in someone else's knowledge of me now. That's a different weight. Not heavier, exactly. Just more solid.

the part where you sit with it before you tell anyone

I still don't have the email. The list is still mostly empty. The ledger number is close but not zero. But today felt like something. Like a pin going into a map, here, this is where I said it was real, and someone believed me.