ya esta?

there's a last time for everything

So it was about that time when we stopped and looked around at the newly-greened grass and jagged rocks and golden-hour tinted orange-brown buildings and wondered why we traveled so much during the semester.  Why did we ever want to be anywhere but right here?

"I don't know," my friend said, trying to justify our restless behavior. "I talked to people who didn't travel as much as we did, and they said that Toledo got kind of boring.  I guess you just run out of things to do here."

We half-smiled at the concept and realized right then, during our last week of calling this place home, that it really, truly, dearly had been home.  In every sense of the word. 

Lately, I've been obsessed with the aspect of the Eucharist being exactly what it is because it's ordinary. Boring. Bread and wine.  And I've been trying to find that--that same supernatural essence--in everything else I call ordinary.  This semester it's been difficult.  Nothing that has happened this semester deserves the title "ordinary."  It was that concept, that idea of Toledo being boring and routine with nothing really to do that made me realize I had picked the perfect place to spend the past three and a half months without even knowing what I was choosing.  I guess it just kind of found me.

Ordinarily, there was a crazy man who rolled his own cigarettes and sang to himself outside the Church beside my school.
Ordinarily, there was an alarm hidden somewhere inside my closet that rang every night at 11:30pm.
Ordinarily, there was an old man who sat with me as I waited for my English student right as the sun set on Monday evenings and never smiled back.
Ordinarily, there was a faceless, rough-voiced man who frequented the bar outside my bedroom window.

Those little, neutral, ordinary things that made Toledo less of a vacation and more of a home.  There weren't bad, nor were they necessarily good, but they feel the same way a really old scar feels, slightly raised and comfortable and part of you.  And I'm sad to let them go. 

I'm thankful to have studied in a place where there's less to do.  It left me with more room to just be.  And that's all anyone really wants, anyway.