Life Slice

Right now I'm sitting in the Cougareat, sipping a small, caffeine-free cup of Diet Coke. Basically it's doing nothing for me, but I'm hoping the taste will trick my body into revving up my energy. Placebo effect, eh?
I'm voraciously slurping--in the most refined manner possible--the last contents of the cup now, because I just took a gigantic bite of my hot and spicy chicken and rice bowl from Teriyaki Stix.  They weren't lying about the hot and spicy.  I've decided that the chicken and rice combo, or maybe just rice, is one of my go-to comfort foods.  I feel like a list of said food is in order:

Paige's Comfort Food List
Peanut Butter
PB&J
Hot bread (tortillas, freshly homemade bread, pitas)
Burritos
Peach Popsicles
Orange Juice
Hot Chocolate
Grapefruit
Apples
Chocolate chips
Pretzels
Hot applesauce with cinnamon
Chicken and rice


Could be a lot worse, eh?  (Please note my Canadian-ness in using "eh?" twice in the same blog post.)
Buy me any of these things and I'm yours forever.  Or, at least a week.

The sounds of the food court are washing over me, a blur of feminine giggles and masculine guffaws and side-conversations. I'm awkwardly sitting directly in front of someone I recognize from high school and I'm trying not to make eye contact or stare.  My lips are still burning from the chicken.  Food and drink gone, I'm trying to find an excuse not to leave this table before I lock myself away in the depths of the Harold B. Lee Library, never to surface until my research paper is complete.

I mean it this time.

Right now, as I'm sitting here, I'm missing people.  I miss my family, I miss my friends away at college, I miss my friends away on missions.  I'm missing the depth of my friendship with those people.  I have to remind myself that it never came quickly.  Things of great value rarely just fall into our laps.  Still, I can't help but think that it all came so much more naturally in high school.  There's just so. many. people. here at BYU.   And not enough time to really move beyond the preliminaries with everyone.

Lest you worry, I'm far from lonely or homesick.  I'm constantly interacting with wonderful, intelligent people. I've met so many of them. I'm just growing weary of small-talk and starting to ache for one of those soul-searching, up-all-night conversations.  Or maybe just a solid talk with someone new.  Someone who is on the same energy level as me, who will get excited about things with me, who will talk about something other than school but still ask me what my favorite book is.  Someone who I want to talk to just as much as they want to talk to me, and vice verse.  Something new.

For now, I'm marching forward with my eyes open for some place-holders for my missing friends. And I have a feeling, just an inkling, that my heart might even open up some new spaces.

Scraping up the last bit of rice in my bowl, I watch a man and wife converse in Sign Language. They're laughing. I keep on thinking the man is motioning to me, I'm thrown off by his extraneous movements. There's something romantic about their silent conversation.  It's private even in public, it's warm.  It's lovely.

Maybe it's not just words I'm missing, maybe I'm just beginning to forget that feeling, the experience of sitting side-by-side with someone, saying nothing, and being totally comfortable with that.  I think that's the true measure of a friendship.  When there's nothing left to be said, you're happy to just

Be.