enthusiasm and hazelnut cream coffee are rushing around in me, quickening my heartbeat and warming up my blood. it feels like my blood is thickening these days, rising from the status of the nauseating diluted red koolaid my cheap babysitter used to give us to a nice raspberry syrup flowing rich and good through veins that have been dormant for a long time.
I sit on the steps of my uncles house, kicking my feet against the pavement and watching him clearing his driveway. the baby spring sun is still small and shy, peeking bashfully through the grey of the clouds but never straying too far, a child gripping her mother's skirt. soon she's going to eat up all this ice and hardened dirt-stained snow and grow nice and strong. in a couple of months she'll excrete it all out again on us in the form of summer and our hemisphere will be happy again for a little while. I babel to my uncle rambunctiously and incoherently regarding our excreting sun, and about space travel and sequencing genomes and medicine and poverty and most importantly, how I'm going to change the world. I expect people to be delighted when I inform them of this but they rarely are. Instead he looks at me for the first time today, my naivety reflecting from his hardened eyes and he says "you know, there's money in engineering."
i stare at him. and he continues moving portions of snow from his driveway to the gutter, one shovel at a time.
