"I remember" workout

I remember learning vocabulary at my grandmother's house after lunch, sitting next to her on their scratchy, unforgiving rust-colored couch. She smelled of Noxzema and toothpaste. Noxzema was her cure-all and she was so obsessive about brushing her teeth, that she had scrubbed them of their enamel.
I remember sweaty, oppressive, Louisiana heat, pressing in on me from all directions. Making me feel like to move was to exert the most effort physically possible. I remember loathing it, needing the air conditioning. I never realized the sun was mostly to thank for the heat. I miss the sun so much now. It's visceral, my desire to live in a place with the bright warmth on my face, shining through my eyelids, making my skin a little ruddier, though rarely tan.
I remember the smell of the public library. That welcomed rush of cold, cold air that was the horseman of a mustiness that can only be pleasant when coming from books. I remember my desire to know overwhelming my curiosity and keeping me from thumbing through a book, any book.
I remember magazines - stacks and stacks of magazines that I wanted to be important to me, but just weren't. I collected magazine after magazine dedicated to Lady Diana after her sudden death but I don't think I ever read a single one. Then of course there were all those other stacks of magazines about teenage boys on television with horrible center-parted hair and too-big flannel shirts. Later there were stacks of Cosmo. Those magazines were both who I wanted to be and who I hoped to deny I actually was. It was similar with books and music. And movies. And sometimes acquaintances.
I remember being so free after high school but also not because I was deathly afraid of myself and everyone else. I was not myself, then again I had no clue who I was. I was groping my way through jungles of self-doubt, anxiety and fear. I have yet to emerge.