7 Days Later:

I've been here for one week.

I ate a cheeseburger out of a van parked on the street last night. It's alright, everyone else does it. In fact, it was recommended. Think of an ice cream truck only with a grill and a deep fryer. I ordered "chips and cheese" and a "cheeseburger with salad." Lettuce, Tomato, and Onion is called "salad" no matter what you put it on. It makes sense. I'm honestly a little partial to the term.

So that bakery, I play bluegrass music right above it. There's student housing there and then on the third floor. My god, I thought, that's just quaint. You have to enter basically through the bakery's back door and then go up a very narrow uneven spiral staircase to get to the rooms. But once you're there it's worth it. The rooms over look the street and are actually more spacious than you'd expect.

We gathered there at 8. We ate some lentils. We tuned up our strings. We started with "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show.
As it turns out, I'm the lead singer for the Harris Manchester Bluegrass Society. How did this happen, both you and I ask? Well, like most things that happen to me, it just happened that way. The pieces come together very slowly and discretely over years and years until: Ohp! I'm lead singer in a band at Oxford University!

Apparently the guy who lead the band last term chose all the songs and sang them all, too. I knew I could pull stuff together for someone else to sing. I knew I could play the bass. I knew I could tell you the lyrics. But something rather different came out of me tonight. It sounded a lot like singing and if you didn't know me you'd take it for simply that.
But it rose from my core and unfurled from my tongue. If I were really cheesy I'd call it "confidence" or "resolve" or some other thing representing my stubbornness to get through this all. No. It wasn't that directly related to the academic issue I've been having.
I think it was more a grasp of familiarity. Sweet pieces of the comfortable and recognizable among everything else that is subtly and unsettlingly different.