Time Warp

I've been caught in what feels like a time warp. It's almost as if the past several years didn't happen, and all is normal. Andrew is home. All eight of us are packed around the dining room table at night, making it easier to follow the "no elbows on the table" rule since there is no room for your elbows (not that that was ever a rule we adhered to....). I am home of course, but not studying, not concerned about registering for summer and fall courses. Though, I did try to get mom to enroll me back in her school. She's been ordering books for the kids for next fall, and I asked her to get some for me too. "You know, 15th grade," I said. She gave me this funny look, flipped to the back of her BJU Press magazine to humor me and replied, "Sorry, it stops at 12th grade."

The kids keep asking me if I'm bored yet. When they see me just meandering around the house, they think they've finally caught me in an act of boredom, and are quick to call me out on it. But no, I assure them. I'm only considering my options.

The flexibility, more than anything, has caught me off guard. There's still a lot to do, still stuff that needs to be done, but for once it needn't be done in any particular order. It's not of critical importance, unlike school. Thanks to the latter, I'm still getting those sensations where my stomach tightens up and something in my brain snaps at me, telling me there is studying or writing to be done, professors to be appeased, and that I can't enjoy anything at all until I get that done. But then, as quickly as it comes, it leaves. The knot looses, my brain relaxes, and thoughts flit towards the sky again.

Even those momentary scholastic panic attacks are getting fewer and fewer, though, the moments of meandering lost-ness shorter, contributing to the feeling of a time warp. The only other indicator that something kind of big went on for a couple years is my desk, which is still cluttered in textbooks, print-outs of articles, paper covered in math problems, sticky notes filled with page numbers. I should clean that up, and it would only take me 5 minutes, but I just haven't gotten up the courage yet.

So it's easy to lay in the yard, close my eyes, listen to everyone's voices, and pretend, not that I am a certain age or anything, but that life never changed. In a sense, it hasn't. We are back where we started. Except for the memories, that is. And, as in Andrew's case, an official looking piece of paper (mine won't arrive for another few weeks).

Of course things won't stay this way for long. New adventures are bound to pop up—and will, by the very definition of life. However, it does make one wonder about how change happens. And maybe ends of things are nearer to their beginnings than we think they are.