things are changing

It's snowing outside. Not very much of it is sticking, and it's beginning to slack off even now. Slowly but surely, though, the world is beginning to look a little whiter. The sharp corners humanity excels at creating are rounding out, turning into the softer shapes that nature loves. The world looks a little cleaner, now, so bright and scoured white by the clouds above.

In a day or two, the snow will be gone. It rarely sticks around long; it seems to have an allergy to the high plains. The sharp corners will be back, and only a few little bits of ice clinging to the shadows will remain to remind us of how the world changed, for a few shining minutes, into something spectacular.

I've forgotten where I was going with that. I'm sort of in love with description, and sometimes it takes over. Apologies.

Today was my last at work. Nearly a year ago, in late April of 2012, I became the newest team member at a local Chick-fil-A. I've spent nearly a year of my life handing people chicken and learning to be really good at it. Ask me a question about procedure, and I can probably answer you, at least so far as it extends to the front counter. I've made friends--and probably a couple enemies, too--and decided that people really are just as complicated as they are in books.

But now it's over. And I don't know quite what to think. On the one hand, I have days of freedom stretching before me. I don't have to worry about work. I don't have to put on a uniform and spend the best part of each day serving chicken. I don't have to say "my pleasure" anymore and put up with lemon juice getting into tiny cuts on my hands.

But at the same time, a whole new chapter is opening up in my life. In a week, I will be leaving home for the longest stretch of time I ever have. I'll be heading to Warrenton, Missouri to attend the Children's Ministry Institute. I'm embarking on a completely foreign adventure, something I've never done before. And I'm going to confess something: I'm not very good with things I've never done before. I think that's maybe why I've stuck to writing, sitting in my room and playing with imaginary friends. They're simply facets of me, and me knows right where she is and what's going on. Even when I went overseas, to places I'd never been, on a journey I'd never undertaken, I had somebody else right alongside me to tell me what to do and where to go and when to do it.

And I'm leaving all that behind. I guess, in the end, I'm just afraid of change and I might eventually get over it and be able to, you know, function like an ordinary human being. But until then, I'll just go on being sort of lost with everything around me.

- Kyla Denae