Full disclosure, I have no blog for this week! For the first time literally this entire year, writer’s block and/or lack of planning has gotten me. Alas, even I was not immune. However, I do find it interesting that it was blogs that eventually broke me. I always assumed it would be playwriting, or perhaps a particularly difficult prose assignment, on the off chance, poetry I had no inspiration for. In all honesty, I had half a hopeful mind that writer’s block wouldn’t lay her ugly hands upon me until I hit essays in Comp. English. Looks as if that was a bit too ambitious for me, though.
Luckily, I do have some sort of an idea. I want to talk about one of my two favorite authors, Rainbow Rowell. Rainbow Rowell is the genius behind one of my favorite books, Fangirl, and the Simon Snow series. Now, though her books may not be the most action packed things, I never read action books, anyway. But Rowell has this beautiful way of capturing moments, a way that makes me beyond envious as a prose writer and (hopefully) future novelist.
In Rowell’s books, moments like that first kiss are so magical that the emotions are spilling off the page and into my chest. Moving into a college dorm is so well portrayed that the anxiety of the main character is leaking out into my own stomach. Homesickness is so potent that it’s floating up to nestle in my brain, and I don’t even have a home to miss. It’s something about the way that Rowell writes emotional moments that just strike directly on the heartstrings, and I think I’ve slightly unraveled why those moments hit my heartstrings so hard, in particular.
It’s because I’m in love with those moments. And not just the book moments of slaying the villain or getting the guy or starting a new life; the real moments, my moments. The moments of sitting in the dark with my roommate, staring out of makeshift minecraft dorm windows and feeling infinite. The feeling of taking two of my new best friends to Jack’s for coffee and laughing so hard my sides ache. The feeling of sitting at a desk in a classroom I never thought I could love so much and watching in wonder as a story makes it’s way out of my head. The times when I watch movies from my childhood on a borrowed playstation from a school issues mattress that’s sitting on the floor. Ordering Domino’s and laughing while we have existential crisis on the red tables outside the Phoenix. Taking walks along the campus coated in fall foliage and feeling alive for the first time in far too long.
It’s these moments, brought to me by my life at MSA, and reflected perfectly in Rowell’s amazing writing, that I live for. The moments that live for me. And I desperately hope that each and every one of you gets to experience one soon, because they’re something that is better than even Rowell can describe.
Sincerely, someone who’s living for his Carry On moments.
