There’s a roller coaster in my hometown called RailBlazer. I remember looking up at what looked like a 180° angle when it had just opened and faking confidence as I told my friends “this one looks fun.” Maybe it was the long line or perhaps the questionable amusement park lunch I had eaten, but by the time there was only a chain separating us from the deck it felt as though sweet fluttering butterflies had been inspired by Despicable Me 2 and become purple piranhas trapped in my stomach. 

 

That’s similar to how I’m feeling right now, T-3 days out from moving into my new home, with classes starting the following day.

 

My body gets into the roller coaster seat while my mind is running far, far away. Cronk—the safety belt goes down, there is no escaping. With a click and then another and another, the train we are in heads straight up. I see the rails, and the sky and that is it. 

 

Wellesley Soccer’s preseason is over, games have begun, and so has school! I thought I had fully grasped the concept of everything happening while I am somewhere else, but it feels weird to not be there.

 

Anticipation, excitement, knowing that once we start going down instead of up I will feel an incomparable thrill but still with the small worry in the back of my mind that doesn’t make sense but still can’t be shaken—my body is, after all, about to be flung around and at this point, I can’t do anything to prevent it from happening. 

 

I know and trust that the thrill will show itself but right now the anticipation and the excitement are the steam over a boiling pot. 

 

It is with these feelings swimming around my head that I find my first sit spot, a temporary one, just a short stroll away from my grandparents’ new apartment. It’s the warmest day of the summer—27 degrees celsius—and people are taking advantage of the weather. It’s September but one wouldn’t be able to tell from the amount of people spread out over towels on the rocky hill and wooden deck below it, that open up into the giant Östersjön (Baltic) like a sink about to flood.

 

I’m on the wooden deck, mostly lying down. It’s a bit of a rough surface but only in the way that I’ll surely feel it the moment I get up, but am safe while I remain there. Feet hit the ground near my head, a bike wheel sounds like cicadas, people talk to each other and on their phones, and the birds call after long lost lovers or a piece of bread abandoned in a crack of the rocky hill. Every ten seconds is punctuated with a splash, people jumping in the biting cold water acting as a fog horn bringing me out of the fog in my head and back into reality. 

 

Life is happening around me, I feel it, I hear it, I see it, and if I could smell it then this is what it would smell like. Light, a whiff of perfume as someone walks by but gone as quickly as it came. Every now and then an ant crawls onto me, I am nothing more than an extension of the rock to it. This ant doesn’t care what grade I get on my next essay, I doubt it cares about any of the things I go and worry about.

 

Or maybe it does. 

 

I wonder if this ant has ever felt the anticipation of a roller coaster train climbing up up up, and felt the rush when it shoots down, about to twist and turn in unknown ways.