Circles and circles.

With everything in the world spinning in circles, the sights before me become a blur, and it is all too easy to just let it keep spinning.

To avoid focusing on anything, we focus on nothing.

But maybe, just maybe, if you reach your hand out, try to steady yourself for even just one second, time long enough for you to take a snapshot, so you have something to hold on to while the world goes back to spinning around you.

That snapshot is my little piece of comfort while the world is dropping beneath my feet, and I can't help but feel grateful for it. I can’t help but feel grateful for anything these days, because everything is so easily taken for granted. I can't help but feel grateful when my roommate comes home with tea when I've spent the day with a cold, or when I see my hometown friend in the street and stop to hug her just for a second, for the briefest moment of comfort found in something, someone, familiar.

There is gratitude in sitting with friends, spending hours upon end discussing the world, God, and pumpkin pie cookie butter. Picking through it and over it at three in the morning because it keeps you sane. It keeps you from dwelling on all of the things you have to do, the places you have to be, the people you have to please, and the ceaseless spinning of thoughts in your head that seem as though they will never stop. We have all procured this little bit of vertigo, in our own sense of the word, because we all have these demons chasing us, bothering us, burdening us. Yet it is these tiny little moments of gratitude that loosen up our caged heart and let a few demons loose.

I can't help but relish in these little moments that are something like gratitude.

When all of the sparkles and glitter and the novelty of what is new and shiny wears off, we are left to be by ourselves to sit and relish in all that we had that was good and happy, and we can feel the gratitude for the things we so foolishly took for granted, like showers without shoes and home cooked meals that don't come with a line and rooms to yourself and peace and quiet and school without boys and teachers who cared and friends who knew you and parents who looked out for you and lovely sweet mamas who did your laundry for you and didn't accidentally dye your sheets pink.

Oh, the many things that rise up in our hearts when we remember all that was good that we so easily took for granted. And they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, so maybe distance makes the good things greater, and we aren't left here lonely and sad, but instead, we sit happy and reminiscent with something like gratitude.