Thing One: Getting face wash in your eyes. I really really hate that. It's really painful. So is that tingling feeling you get when your foot falls asleep, and you don't want to move it because you know that'll hurt more, but you have to because if you don't it will never wake up.
Thing Two: When something that was once fully yours ceases to be completely yours because you show it to someone else and they take a stake in it. (i.e. the note, this blog, your nanowrimo novel-ish thing, a secret crush when it's not a secret anymore, your black leggings that your sister borrows without telling you.)
Thing Three: That inkling to do something, anything but what you're doing right now. But you can't put a finger on what that something is. You just know that this, whatever this is, sleeping eating sitting doing homework, isn't what you want to be doing. You turn on the tv but that's not what you want to be doing. You can't focus on a book and no one's online and texting is stupid. Restlessness.
Thing Four: The way people act when they're with their friends. You pick up on this as you're sitting in class listening to the people that sit around you, because somehow you're the only one in this part of the room that doesn't know everyone else. Seating chart fluke. Two minutes ago you asked this guy a question about the problem on the board and now he's singing Billy Ray Cyrus in a high-pitched voice under his breath. About-face.
Thing Five: Anger. Withheld anger. Anger that boils up to the surface all of a sudden. Anger that you can see in the way someone holds their hands by their sides, the way they grit their teeth when they talk, the way they become forceful, frustrated, cold.
Thing Six: That blunt edge that you have to your voice when you're talking about that one thing that drives you absolutely insane, the one that only your mom and your clueless friend can pick up on.
Thing Seven: Thinking about the future. When you think about the future so much that it becomes this vast expanse of not knowing, this big open space of possibilities, of what ifs buts and sos. When you imagine your life as if you're a character in your favorite book or some book you got from the library a long time ago and can't remember the name of but can't get out of your head.
Thing Eight: Goals. Setting goals. Not setting goals but keeping them in the back of your mind anyway. Cleaning off your desk, going through the old bottles in your bathroom, making a decoupage project with the fortune cookie fortunes you've been saving for the last year.
Thing Nine: The way that someone can say something perfectly nice to you and you're so awkward that you're caught off guard and ask them to repeat it - "what?" - even though you heard it clearly the first time. And then you're sitting there and wondering what the hell that's supposed to mean. You're golden.
Thing Ten: The second person. The ubiquitous "you" - the openness, take-your-pick, serve yourself methodology. The you, the reader you. The you, the you that you, the reader you, want to talk to as you're reading about the you, the you that the writer is talking to. Thinking about a word so much that it becomes meaningless. Thinking that if you, you yes you, read this far then you, yes you, deserve a cookie, but should type you you you something about you into the comments instead.
