I always say I’m going to write more in the summer, as if the heat and light could coax the right words into existence, lifting them into the unwavering humidity where they’d hover long enough that I could write them down. Summer evaporated, as usual, with happy hours and crop tops and long runs.

It didn’t happen, of course, as I finished my first legal internship, studied for the MPRE and explored my *technically speaking* home state of Minnesota. I waited for the right words, wondered where they’d gone, if they were ever really there at all.

My journal from 1L year is 4,454 words and reads like a frenetic plea for help, a cacophony of all-caps crises, italicized epiphanies and wine-fueled run-on sentences. Did I run out of words?

I was unusually one with nature in Minnesota this summer.

I thought a lot about home this summer, the way it can exist in multiple places at once. The way that people I met over the summer are a big reason it ever felt like home. The way that sunrises and sunsets seem to linger longer when a place becomes home, the way the pinks and oranges and yellows cling to imaginary folds in the sky, staining it with color just before I fall asleep. Continue reading →