I’m sitting in a coffee shop in the city and it looks like this outside:

It’s been raining on and off all day (and I got my feet wet), but you know what?

It’s a beautiful day.

It’s been a day of lasts: last classes, last lessons, last struggle to get out of the old armchair in Prof. Jones’ office, where I’ve spent hours learning about music history and life.

A song I really like just came on the radio in here, and the last paper I’ve been researching for at Sibley (Eastman’s Music Library) is going to be one of those papers I really enjoy (yes, it’s possible). I think I’m just edgy enough to look like I belong in this dark, cluttered shop filled with musicians; I’m wearing my red boots, after all. I’m in a corner by an old grand piano covered with house plants that range from self-confident to scraggly, and coffee-lovers stream in and out continuously. A variety of life traipses back and forth on the street just outside the window–cops, hipsters in combat boots, pairs of businessmen in three-piece suits, women in stilettos, tiny musicians lugging giant instruments, intrepid urbanites with face tattoos, asians in columbia ski jackets, old men with big ears and decks of cards: they are mundane and individual, unique and faceless all at once.

I’m just the girl in the corner with the macbook and the iced tea, another fixture in the coffee shop, another face with a life and stress and decisions to make. I am neither distinct nor nondescript; I am here, but I do not stand out (and don’t want to). I sit and type away, they talk and read and meet and dream. For now, my simple existence as a pair of eyes, an observer of the world whirling around me, is enough. The trees outside hung with their twinkeling lights dance in the breeze, and I write in circles and splices and anonymity.

It’s a beautiful day.