The Wrong Part Got All the Attention

I re-read the post from a few days ago this morning. Not on purpose, I was just looking for the link to share with someone, but then I kept reading, the way you do when it's your own writing and you can't quite help it. And I noticed something. The part I actually thought about, the walk, the playlist, the late-August general vibe I was going for, that stuff got like two comments. Nice ones, but two. The part I almost didn't put in, the one sentence near the bottom about signing up for Creative Writing, that's where everybody went.

the face you make re-reading your own posts

I'm not even sure why I buried it there. Maybe because it still didn't feel real. Maybe because putting it at the bottom meant it was optional, like a postscript, like if nobody responded I could pretend I hadn't really said it. But people responded. And not in a way I expected, not 'oh fun!' but in a way that was more specific, more like they recognized something. Which is a weird feeling when you were trying to be casual about the thing.

staring into the middle distance about a blog comment. normal.

It bothered me in the same way Priya's comment bothered me, after I wrote about the end of semester. Not bad-bothered. Just that specific feeling where something landed harder than you meant it to and now you have to decide if that was an accident or not. I think I'm going to sit with that for a bit before I do anything about it. Fall semester starts in a couple of weeks. I have time to think about what I'm actually doing here.