I wrote for a long time tonight. Scrawling raw, dark words on a blank page, my heart and hands wrote things my head is still trying to grasp. Words poured themselves onto the page with an intensity, passion and grief that surprised me and, reading over it, I feel a mixture of devastation and relief.

There is hill on campus covered in clover and that hums with the quiet whir of bees' wings. I spent over an hour on that hill today listening to the bees, feeling the cool grass between my toes as the sun brought freckles to my shoulders. Eyes closed, I clutched my knees and tried to feel. Connect. Be. Feel the ground beneath me, feel the faint breeze, feel the whirring of the bees, feel the warmth of the sunshine, feel the energy of the countless students passing all around me. I wanted to rise out of myself and dive deep within the earth and feel the dirt, feel the roots growing, feel the rumble of thousands of feet, feel the groaning of earth's bones as she struggles to hold us all. I wanted to rest my hands on the nearby tree and feel the roughness, evaporate inside it and feel the coursing heartbeat of the stately rings, feel the roots clenching the dark earth, feel the water rising through the trunk, feel the leaves stretching towards the sun. I wanted to feel.

Instead, my words came pouring out tonight angry, grief-stricken, and desperate. Every day is a deep, constant struggle with pervasive apathy. I smile at the people I pass and make small talk with the kids in class, because that's what I do. I can pretend. It's my talent I despise the most, yet my most tried-and-true defense. Ironic.

"Girls like us, when we love, it takes everything we have."  -Sarah Addison Allen