Zachary Starr

Okay, I owe you guys an apology.

I haven’t written a blog post in a really long time. Longer than I intended, certainly longer than I realized, and definitely long enough that sitting down to write this one feels a little strange.

I kept meaning to come back.

There was always going to be a post next week. Or when I had a free afternoon. Or when life settled down enough that I could sit somewhere quiet, collect my thoughts, and actually have something worth saying.

You can probably guess how well that worked out.

Somewhere along the way, summer disappeared.

It feels like it only just started, and now I’ve already been back in class for a few weeks. The long days are getting shorter. Schedules have replaced those wonderfully vague summer plans. Life has gone from we’ll figure it out back to calendars, deadlines, alarms, assignments, and trying to remember what day of the week it is.

And, strangely enough, I think I needed that.

Summer was good. It was busy, occasionally chaotic, and over much too quickly. But getting back into a routine has reminded me how much I’ve missed this.

Writing.

Not because I have something profound to say every time I sit down at a keyboard. Most of the time, I probably don’t. But this blog has always given me somewhere to slow down for a little while and turn all the random things bouncing around inside my head into words.

I didn’t realize quite how much I’d missed doing that until I started writing this.

So consider this my official return from an accidentally extended summer vacation.

Now that classes are underway and everything is beginning to settle into something resembling a routine again, I want to start writing here more often. I have things I want to talk about, stories I want to tell, thoughts I’ve been carrying around, and probably at least a few completely unnecessary tangents waiting to escape.

I’m not going to make some ridiculous promise that I’ll post every Tuesday at precisely 7:03 p.m. We all know me better than that.

But I am going to make more room for this.

And to those of you who have kept checking in, reading old posts, following along elsewhere, or simply wondering when I was going to remember that I have a blog:

Thank you.

And I’m sorry I left you waiting so long.

Summer may be over, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. There’s something about the beginning of a new school year that always feels a little like hitting reset. New classes. New routines. New possibilities.

A blank page.

And I think I’m finally ready to start filling mine again.

— Zachary