Tea & Truth Talks

Happy back-to-school to all the kids, college students, and mommies and daddies out there! I never realized exactly how much I would miss school until I woke up last Friday morning and realized that I am not starting classes as so many are. As we age, it is inevitable to romanticize the past, because while it may not have been completely pleasant at the time, we discover that those little moments are never ours again. So, in honor of the beginning of the school season, I have compiled  a list of things I will miss about school. Ready for a nostalgic trip? Let's go! The "school smells". Wooden pencil shavings. That chemical-leeching weird plastic material used to make kids' backpacks. Pink rubber erasers. The endless supply of Lysol wipes for our desks (wait... was that just my fourth-grade class?) School foods. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on fresh white bread, and Lunchable packs you were so excited about because you did not care about nutritional value...

If you walk into my bedroom right now, chances are you will trip on something . Actually, probably more likely, multiple "somethings". In one corner, in a messy stack shoved against my dresser, lies a couple bulging photo albums, atop several worn, dirtied, smudged, and ripped collections of sloppily penciled-in thoughts. Not four feet above it rests a tidy shelf, boasting my collection of yearbooks from the four schools I attended. Okay, pick a number between one and three hundred-sixty. Now imagine you turn that many degrees in any direction. Wherever you end up, you are looking at more scattered song lyric journals, diaries, and random (filled) notebooks than you can count. Now, most would call this hoarding, and I am sure they are probably quite correct. But as I sit and surround myself in these dusty recordings of thoughts and memories, a very wonderful and unexplainable emotion of sentiment washes over me. Have you ever stumbled across something that you wrote back...