I am exhausted. When I moved into my apartment 3-odd years ago, my mom asked me if I needed a pair of curtains for my bedroom window. Half-distracted by the novelty of my new living situation, I mumbled something adjacent to “Ehhhh, nahhhh”. What a mistake. It is (and was) a very pretty view, I admit; dangling vines and deciduous trees arc across the stone-littered hillscape, and often, the moon and stars will peek just above the topmost rung of my windowsill. It’s wonderful, really, but bears unintended consequences. My sleep schedule has, effectively, been sacrificed to the whims of a malevolent sun god. No matter how much mid-20s debauchery I get up to late at night (or homework!!!), I find myself waking with the first break of sunrise—and, as any sleep aficionado knows, going back to sleep after that initial waking is about as restful as an air raid siren. I don’t often sleep very well or very long. The whole situation is thick with poetic metaphor; however, most Monday mornings, I’m too busy hocking up phlegm and half-heartedly sipping instant coffee to notice. With a few hours of caffeination separating me from today’s morning, I may now, just barely, have the capacity to explore these underpinnings. For instance: how arrogant is it of me to love nature when it’s at arms-length, but to despise its ingress? How strange is it that I divide the world into these blocky compartments? How bizarre is it to even *be* at all?

The world is full of these sorts of spiritual, symbolic currents (if you can call them that), and they often grasp at me from these Monday shadows—or the very edges of my perception. There are whisperings of meanings in all things; a favorite of mine is a charcoal-colored echo of graffiti beneath the balcony of the EMU library, just adjacent to the entrance to I.S. services. I stumbled over there today, just to make sure I hadn’t somehow dreamed it into existence, and can confirm it is (at the very least) real. I still can’t quite scry what the scrawling once said (it must have been washed off, or lost to time), but to my best estimation, and if I stand at just the right spot, it seems to have read “Love Wins”. Isn’t that breathtaking? A quiet murmur against an indifferent brick wall, a sentinel of righteous love that has weathered the erosive character of the world. My throat catches when I see it; I feel connected to the entirety of the universe, in an unrequited sense. Like an island littered with bottled messages. I feel symbolic meaning pressing outward against my body, too. It smolders at my pores. My skin. My clothes. My long hair. My (poorly) painted nails; all symbols, all extensions of an encyclopedic, wordless selfhood, which crosses and whirls with the essence of the extant world. My conscious experience of this, it seems, is the headwater of the river of my soul, and pollution done to it risks the degradation of the entirety of my spiritual system. And yet, I’m expected to exist in this toxic modernity, disconnected from the flow of things. The acrid, stagnant pond scum of the world seeps into the groundwater often and wraps itself around the necks of sea turtles. I don’t want to be bitter, negative, or cynical; but what else is there to feel? Are these not the natural responses of an ill-prepared, soft mammal, faced with the dark talons of the world? That graffiti was once vibrant, why can’t I live in the universe where it remained so?… Why can’t I draw the curtains? I don’t want to row against the current of time or wallow in could-have-beens, but surely there must be quieter waters over the horizon? The long-dried upstream of that muddy graffiti, tucked away under chipping sheetrock, must have led somewhere else. Maybe some forgotten ocean somewhere. Gosh, I’ve got a real case of “the Mondays”, that’s for sure. But it’s too warm outside to worry about that. There are distant bells ringing, and the trees on campus are blooming. In the absence of conch shells, we can still press our ears to the soil. Tomorrow morning, it’ll be Tuesday, and I will wake up the same as today, but I hope, then, that I find the courage to catch myself when those orange-red rays pierce the mountainside. What a blessing it is that the world extends itself to meet me every morning, and what an honor it is to return my bleary gaze in grace.