The thing about cobwebs, though, is their extreme flammability. At first it was exhilarating to watch those tiresome questions go up in smoke. In their absence I was content to roll along inside my joy bubble, sure it would pop soon enough. When it proved resilient, new questions burned their way unbidden into my head. Better questions. The kind you have to answer, if you’re doing it right, every second of your life. […]
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It’s not really a magic spell, I guess. It’s intuition (magic, I guess, by another name, but we’re not going to get anywhere rational in this post). I use intuition like sonar: it tells me the shape of things without offering much in the way of detail. Once I know the shape, everything else about a relationship is learning to see each other in the dark. This is not an unerring process. There’s a lot of fumbling and stubbing of toes on the furniture. […] The first time I stood on UNCA’s campus was for a math test, of all things. My dad drove the two hours into the mountains with me, and we both looked a little cock-eyed at the line of dreadlocked, Birkenstock-clad hippie children streaming into the lecture hall. Dad knew the type and didn’t much like them, I guess, but I’d never spent any time outside of my hometown, and just had no idea what to make of the de facto uniform my new peers were wearing. It was a far cry from the camo jeans and baseball caps back home. […] |
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"There are times I've wished I said all the folly in my heart and not the wisdom in my head." ~ A.J. Roach |
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