Mute

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.~William Wordsworth

I've been experiencing writers' block lately, but not for lack of trying. I'd been feeling under the weather after the Beale Street Music Festival (which, by the way, was fantastic, despite the raining out of Amos Lee's set), and last weekend, I chose to give myself the most relaxing two days I've had in months by doing no work whatsoever until Sunday evening. I always felt like I wanted to blog or write a letter or write a story, but when I actually got around to doing it... nothing. I updated my Teach For Us blog after my algebra students finished their testing, but I have so much more to say about the end of the school year and how this year has gone. I just don't know how to articulate it.

It could well be that I have more outlets for my feelings nowadays. After years of more or less living alone, I now share a residence with three people to whom I am very close, and I know that after a crazy day, they will be there to embrace the venting and the rambling. I write as a way to remember things, and maybe my lack of substantial writing this year is my reluctant acknowledgement that I have been feeling things I don't want to remember. It will be enough to hold my frustrations and negativity in my memory - if they even last; frequently, they are so temporary that it's not even worth typing them out.

What I do want to remember about this time in my life is not how I feel about my students, not how I feel about my job, not how I feel about TFA, but rather how I feel about me, how I feel about life, how I feel about my city. I am the happiest I have been all year (sure, you can chalk it up to the school year's ending, but I think there's much more to it than that), and I have never been so proud to call a city home. There are many notable things going on right now, thrusting Memphis into the national spotlight - record Mississippi River flooding; Obama's coming on Monday to speak at a high school commencement; the Grizzlies' forcing a game 7 against the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference semifinals (Game 6, which I attended with Rita, Jill, and one of Jill's adorable middle-schoolers, was incredible, even from the nosebleed seats) - and I'm glad to be here. Of course, I'm not happy that there's flooding, and the media makes it seem like the whole city is underwater, but it's still part of why it's a historic time right now.

Maybe I haven't been writing as much because my life has just been too full.