Unkempt hair, going on 48 hours without a shower, not a lot of time to myself this weekend, and it’s all due to tons of “take home” work. Oddly enough, though, “it’s all good”. Normally, I would be stressing and expressing to whomever would listen, but not this time. This time there’s positive, not negative.

I feel like the world is beginning to open up after so many years of being tightly shut. There are shades of light on a leaf and sounds underneath a song that somehow emerge, seemingly from nowhere. But it’s more than sensory, and it’s more than a trite “high on life” syndrome.

This feeling of wonder has been growing within me steadily for the past six months, and with it comes a new found fascination for all of the arts, cultures, philosophies, and - as a dear friend of mine loves to say - “abstract notions” that billow and spin about us every day. Everything feels exciting, all at once, and the world is reinvented, if only in my eyes.

Amazed as I am, and perplexed just the same, I have been cautious. I’ve asked friends and family, older than myself, if this is temporary. If this richness is only an initial blinding revelation that there is so much to be experienced? So far my most reassuring and honest response has been from my mother, smiling widely, knowingly, and replying with, “It gets better every day.”

The sheen and possibility of that “every day” is what is truly stunning to me. I wish so intensely for this to never fade from me, as I have already come to love it more than anything I have ever known.