The last 100 days

A paper chain hangs in my dining room. It takes over an entire wall, zig-zagging back and forth because special reasoning is not my strong suit and one-hundred strips of paper is apparently a lot.

I graduate in less than one-hundred days.
Eighty, to be exact.
In eighty-one days, I'll get on the 210 one last time, me and Bear and an auntie and uncle who are now my professional cross-country movers.
In eighty-two days, I'll pull up in front of a house that will seem foreign but become my home.
In eighty-three days, I'll wake up in my new bed for the first time.

I'm spending these last 100 days like I have spent the last four years.
Going to work, school, huddling with friends around a tiny laptop to watch trashy television while drinking wine in our yoga pants.

But I'm doing it a little bit slower. I am soaking in the moments a little bit longer and giving myself the grace to not mop the floors because I will always have floors, but I will not always have these friends or these hills or this taco shack down the road.

I'm tattooing what 6am looks like on my mind.
I'm doing things I always wanted to do but never made the time.
I'm etching the feeling of sand between my toes, the stop-and-go of 4pm traffic, and the smell of morning smog into my mind.

I'll need it later.

I'll need the 6am city lights when my new town has just gotten a little too small.
I'll need the sand when I sit through my first winter and learn just what the rest of the world was talking about.
I'll need the stop-and-go traffic when life has gotten complacent and just a little bit boring and my goodness, where is the culture and why do I keep seeing the same people everywhere?
I'll need the smell of morning smog when... well, never. That one I won't need. But it will bring me back to where I am, that much more grateful and aware of the fresh air around me.

I'll need these memories when I miss my friends and my beach bonfires and my rhythm that I have developed over four long-quick years.

I'll need it, I'll use it, and then I'll make new friends and new mountain bonfires and establish a new rhythm - because maybe the last 100 days are really just any other 100 days.