This morning I got a late start, as I do most Mondays after packing in a weeks worth of activities on Sunday. That’s what happens when you are in a long distance relationship, you make up for lost time. When I finally decided to get up and get on with my work day (working for myself) and I looked out my apartment window to see a gloomy, rainy day waiting for me. It took all of my will power to not just curl back into bed and be lazy for the day. I started to get ready and a wave of nostalgia hit me like a bus. Most days I can block it out and get on with the present but today I let it in and embraced it. This happens to me every single year in the fall, a longing to go back. I went to the back of my closet and picked out pink pastel dress pants that I hadn’t worn since college. I quick tried them on while preparing a back up outfit in my head because I’m not exactly as fit as I was when I was working out six days a week and running track in college. They slipped right on and I either lost five pounds in my rear over night or it was a Sister of the Traveling Pants type of thing…I decided on the latter because of the amount of donuts that seem to consume my diet. I packed up my art supplies and headed over to the coffee shop that I would go to most days before class in college, grabbed a mocha and an apple fritter to go and parked my car right by my college house. As I took the walk down Laurel Street to the library as I did so many times in college, a flood of thoughts poured over me.

This weekend was not all good. Parts of it were quite horrible actually. Small arguments turned into larger arguments and it was a weekend of backing down and working things out. I’m stubborn and opinionated and those qualities have made me so good at so many things in life but I’ve often thought it makes me an impossible person to get along with at times. I like things to turn out the way that I have them planned in my head and it’s often times unrealistic and unattainable for life to match up to these expectations. Letting go of my perfectionism and expectations for others will always be a challenge for me. It is a quality that makes being an artist a frustrating career because it’s never perfect and there is a lot of failure involved, much like life and relationships.

The second something isn’t going right for me, I have a tendency to look forward or backwards and think, “Wouldn’t life be better if a, b or c was different?” For Nick and I it is often, “Life will be so much better when we’re living in the same city.” It may be true but there are bound to be other challenges when we get to that point in life. I can guarantee myself that. I know there will be some point in the future where I will look back on this time in my life, much like I do my college years and think, “Remember our Sundays when we were dating long distance and how excited we were to pack everything into one day?” So this is what I have decided, wouldn’t life be better if we all lived in the season we’re in and enjoyed the present day to the fullest?

xoxo-

qk