Over the past year, I’ve developed a habit of asking people questions.

It used to be social survival. I’d essay desperately in middle school to get the other person to talk, prodding them to puncture awkward silence. I learned quickly the questions had to be open-ended, or they could fall flat on their face.

Right now, I would ask this. And the question’s a little cheesy, having been asked before. But as I’ve come to confront it myself, asking it is its own offering of solidarity. Would you answer it this way too?

I would ask, how do you see change?

How do you personify it? Imagine it. Give it shape, a sleek animal form.

Do you see change like the sea -- tirelessly beating at you, endless and everywhere, every shade of blue? Cold and empty, while teeming with life forms alien and exquisite. Do you fear breaking on its waves the moment you quit harbor, your wooden sails failed when tested, or fear never again seeing land?

Do you see change like a steady arrival of packages -- a stork’s busy beak. With some degree of regularity, and some warmth too. Always lightly surprising, change is the correspondence of a friendly pen pal, a lifeline kept at a distance, updating you about small seismic changes.

Do you see change as a shadow -- leaking out of a brighter corner, the door slightly ajar? You could close the door, but then the light would be gone, even if its nourishment is gloating and small. Perhaps change is the promise of something beyond that door. The old saying, The best is yet to come.

Do you see change as an animal predator -- taking days and nights to rest when needed, but never withdrawing the hunt. It’s committed to your scent individually, and tends to walk invisible alongside you, until you startle at any sound like it. A delicate matter, it can never catch you, but the threat has been made, and you live constantly looking out for it.

Do you see change like a board game -- battling for kings and kingdoms. There are wonky obstacles and scarce, random prizes. You can only go forward in the game, but sometimes you can maneuver. You convince yourself you can outsmart the game. Sometimes there’s only two at the board; sometimes an entire party.

Do you see change as a happy thing -- or a scary thing, a maddening thing, sensitive, inconsiderate, bumbling, striking thing, not entirely random? Do you see change as a lonely entity, catching all the people it can in its cloud?

Do you see change as a disease, always creatively spreading? Like the entropy of the universe, ever increasing, unless you put in work to put things in order. Do you see change as the paradox you never meant to discover, its properties rude and exceptional, unfailingly foreign?

Do you see change like oil paint -- there’s all the colors, and if you can’t find a color, make it. Like oil paint, you can’t really erase it. You have to paint over it once it dries. Over and over again, and an x-ray can still tell the truth. Do you see it as a stain? You try to get it out with rubbing alcohol and it won’t come out. Maybe it does with soap. But you can’t get over the fact that for that hour, when it was there, it was there.

Do you see change as a macro lens -- always zooming out. World affairs are intimately knotted to your own. And for every person falling in line in war, falling asleep, or falling in love, you are part of these small global tilts.

Do you see change as something you created -- your penmanship all over the walls. Your great pride, duty, travesty, or error: whatever is true, you made it.

Do you see change as a whisper -- quickly changing its form the moment you set your eyes on it?

Do you see change as an event -- one rude speed bump at the crossroads of your life? Does the event ever stop happening?

Do you see change as a place -- the people in it always moving.

Do you see change as a person?

Do you see change as not really change at all -- because you are the one who will live your life, that because it’s you and always you, nothing will really change?

I see change as all of these things, with an arm’s stretch of the imagination.

I see change as more concrete things, too. The name of the college I will go to, the day I will leave, the clothes I will pack that look like home.

But more and more, I see change as a world we live in. It surrounds us already. But sometimes, like the mornings that sunrise burns more obviously, there are times we notice it more than others.

I wish you the best, no matter the uncertainties. I hope your path is thrilling and long. My own has just begun.