Look At Me

The day was bright and clear, the air so fresh that it almost made it feel like it was scrubbing out my lungs and I kept on breathing in deeply through my nose, letting it settle in me deeply before I let it out long and slow through my lips.

A day like this is bracing.

People tend to use that to describe a day that is cold or chilly or something along those lines. The kind of day where you step out and the temperature shift shocks you and you wrap your coat around yourself, bracing against the weather and putting your shoulder into it as you curse at the fact that you're leaving your nice warm hovel.

Bracing is almost universally negative but I want to propose an alternative definition. Because bracing just means fresh and invigorating and to me it can be that you're blasted with cold or chill and struck awake, evoking feelings of wanting to hide away again, but it can also mean the very opposite.

The day I walked out into was life affirming. One of those days where you're past the summer heat but not yet into the cold chill of fall. The kind of day where the air seems cleaner and clearer and the world just seems more vivid. More alive and present.

Deeper greens on the grass and a brighter blue in the sky. The world seeming so much vaster and also so very much more filled with possibilities as you stare out and swear you can see past the buildings to the horizon and beyond it.

A world that feels like it contains endless possibilities, all ready for you to seize.

Carpe diem. Seize the day. And with each step I take I feel like I'm doing that. I feel like I'm taking action and pushing things forward and more important than everything else I feel like I'm stepping out of my comfort zone and nowhere is that more obvious to me than the attention that I get.

It started the moment I crossed onto the edge of campus. Campus being this large plot of land with rolling hills and forests and buildings all over, small single family homes or low rise apartments dotted out on the edges of it.

There was an official demarcation between the land of the city and the land of campus, but more even than that there was an unofficial demarcation. Things like rush hour and happy hour and just racing around to get places didn't affect the campus, the school. Sure people had places to be and times they had to be there but it was such a much more relaxed pace.

You don't often see people lounging about in a city during the day. Or well I suppose you do but it's different somehow. On a campus the people sitting around it just feel like they're taking their time with things, deliberating deliberately and watching the world around them with keener eyes.

And right now, for me, that meant that as I walked those eyes were turned on me.

Not for the first time, sure.

When I was getting my tour of campus. When I was soaked to the bone and rushing to safety. When I was walking up to the party and the eyes in the dark were peering at me.

All those were times where I had felt like I was being watched, like I was being witnessed. And some of them were in day and some of them were in dark but all of them sent a shiver up and down my spine and it wasn't until this moment that I really realized why.

But as I walk down campus, long legs exposed to the sunlight and a skip in my step. My body bouncing and hips swaying just that right amount and my eyes behind my mirrored sunglasses shifting this way and that to watch and pick out the men and women who were watching me pass, I realized why my heart was beating with a thrill this time instead of fear like the last time.

It was because I chose this time. It was because I wanted them to witness me.

And if that wasn't a clear enough indication to me that I was meant to be this woman, then I didn't know what was.

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