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One of the absolutely amazing things about graduate school is the wonderful community of creative individuals following their passion. It’s easy to get sucked into that community and forget about the outside world sometimes. Often I’ll be sitting on the train and yet not there, or walking, or just sitting in my apartment, swearing I was going to make dinner an hour ago but lost thinking of a line for a poem.

All that’s great, but sometimes parts of life outside the community screams back in to make you remember. For instance, the picture above is where I was when I found out my younger sister (3 years to be exactish) had gotten engaged.

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I was with my girlfriend when I found out. This is unusual because my girlfriend still lives back where I was before I came to Chicago for school, and I don’t see her much more than once every 4-6 weeks for a weekend here and there. Without getting too personal, it’s a tough thing to manage a long-distance relationship with her while I’m in such a different and exciting community here. It takes me in and out.

The upshot of this post is simple: standing there listening to my sister tell me the news was shocking and left me feeling a bit existential as, you know, this is kind of an adult thing to have happening. I feel a bit disconnected from the forward progress of life things like getting married while I’m here. The world is continuing to hum by even as I am on such a different plane of the universe, still connected certainly, but now from a different angle than before.