Room to dance again.

Spring Break meant going north for me this year. I spent a deliriously good time with my cousin who is nine years my elder, yet is still childishly innocent and artistic inside. Boston is a city with iron-wrought gates, burnished brick, cold, river air and cigar stubs on sidewalks. It breathes academia and yet contains a balance between urban culture and business suits holding tubes of business plans.

I purchased an expensive black chiffon skirt there. It was partially due to the lack of clothing sales tax, partially because its essence evoked a Carrie Bradshaw-esque spirit: sophisticated yet whimsical and partially because it seems the most appropriate article to bring to Europe that I felt empowered, but not obligated.

But the chiffon skirt has since lay curled in its crinkling parchment and glossy, magenta bag at the bottom of my bed, as if even in my dreams, it stays repressed and inescapable, like my mood these past few weeks.

Springtime always intoxicates me with its perfume, pink petals of overwhelming beauty and everlasting hope. Yet I find myself resorting to the first line of The Wasteland too often, and it's only March. But, in an effort to embrace the agreeable weather and suppress this dark lump of coal folded within me from events of my yesterdays,  I strolled downtown with enjoyable company and let the sun soak through my skin, letting its energy store within the gaps of my flesh for impending clashes and boulders ahead.

With some guiding words, a turn into a vein of main street, which stretches but one mile, past a tea/ bike shop, a rustling creek and a stunted bridge and car park, exists a capital nook, small yet mountainous collections of vintage comics, Majesty magazines, and an accumulation of long forgotten books and never-to-be-forgotten classics. Of course, we cooed over Emerson, Fitzgerald and Hugo; a $2.99 hardcover of Cold Mountain plopped onto my lap. The register proved its legitimacy due to its owner, a man with white tuffs of hair, which formed snowy peaks, seemingly dolloped onto a glistening forehead, a man who appeared to live a quiet life, hunched over the stacks of literature with a scrap of paper and pencil for sales calculations, but who has seen the world through a million eyes and imaginations, all transpired onto ink and grouped into words.

A daunting stack monitored his strategic, vocal arithmetic. I glided through the authors and titles and spontaneously decided to incorporate an Ian McEwan and Bridges of Madison County, to the dismay my plastic shopping bag.

And tonight, out of a frenzy of inexhaustible boredom and curiosity, I started reading the latter. It began articulately, with punctuated words and bold narrative, but eventually flowed like warm caramel with its rich, wise words by the end of the introduction. Defying my Tuesday biology exam, I decidedly sunk into a leather chair in Starbucks and let the current of an amorous, yet morose plot gush.

It was, of course, a tale of tears and burning joy, an ephemeral climax preceding an infinite fall. In essence, it revolved around a basic decision: to go or not to go, to spring into new territory or remain in the old, blue-denim heartland. Waller depicts new love, filling it with poetry and subtle actions, contrasting the retellings of their story, which leaves a fragment of familiarity and mundanity, its technique reminding readers of the true nature of her everyday tasks and marriage in a small town.

Was it a love for the ages to be recorded throughout history, its emotions discriminatory to specific generations? Can the fire be infinite inside a human heart? The novel is too novel, and I'm not certain where my analysis will take me, but it seems as if, upon the moment of completion, the air cleared, the dust dispersed for I had seen a momentary glimpse of blossoms. I swiped off the remnants of my black nail polish and doubt and will prepare for tomorrow. Perhaps, I will finally slide on my black chiffon skirt and embrace what little happiness that resonates from its sweeping twirls, and simply live for the moment.

Nothing better than...

learning about photosynthesis and attempting to memorizing the first 100 digits of Pi (for fun). Come at me.