for the struggle

I feel no pain for you, only sadness.


It's been such a terribly long week, and a longer evening. I think of the time when you told me that sleep would make everything seem better. My intent was not to push you away. And I am sorry that I foreclosed on our limitlessness but really, child, there was more than enough dealing to be done.

Don't taunt me, and don't prejudge my sadness. It is more than a little bit lucky that I've emerged on the other side of growing-up whole, if you look at who I was a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. Emerging strong and dreaming and learning altogether even better. There are things about the young life that I miss -- the endorphines, the competition, the limitless sense of acceleration and pain. Those things yet to be discovered.

When I am quiet and boring and sad, realize that I've waited a long time for the freedom to lie in bed and reread old books for an afternoon, and feel whatever it is that I feel.

per le say

Still slogging my way through exams. I'll be done on Tuesday.

There's really nothing else happening with me. I feel heavy and awful and weak all the time; I sleep too much and at the wrong times and I desperately need to work out more. Only I don't want to become a rabid distance runner again and I don't know what else I can do. Maybe I'll go to the gym not for karate, for once (I have been saying that all week).

I keep making "I'll see you soon" promises to semifriends and I don't really intend to keep very many of them (which is a little sad, I know).

I never got to see you over my little break even though I desperately wanted to. I was too busy heaving my guts up all morning (period sickness wtf).

As Barry said, I hate December. I will be so glad when the stress of exams and family and holiday and travel (eesh, all of those things combined look like death) is OVER and I can sit back under the windowsill, enjoying the way the wind plays through the naked trees and riding my horse on cold cold pure mornings.

reading: Women and Gender notes
listening to: Long White Arms // Paula Cole

i'm walking on a wire

I came home today, to learn that the itty bitty high school seniors are finding about their colleges of choice around now.

The giving, loving, sweet part of me wants to see them get into Smith and Cornell and Oxford and Princeton and UC-Berkely, pack their matching suitcases and leave this little hill town behind, preserve memories of coffee shops and early morning bagels and lovely fall country roads in translucent fossilized amber.

The bitter, unmitigated part of me wants them to taste failure and rejection, to face the next four years and see unchanging surroundings, lowered expectations. To see them move from hope and new life to a sour, biding-my-time sort of attitude.

Maybe I am more well-suited to this restraint, though. I've been saying it for a long time and I still think it's a little true -- I'm not invested in my own happiness. My academics are about competition, departmental status and proving other people wrong. My athletics are about reaching for perfections, accumulating knowledge and skill and using it to its fullest extent. Whatever I do socially, I do out of obligation to old friends, family members, or those people I need to keep diplomatic relations with. I love my girlfriend because I love her and it is not what I would have chosen, but I invest the future of my life in her, instead of myself.

reading: nothing, actually.
listening to: curbside prophet // jason mraz

and the wind cries mary

I don't think our journey is done yet.

You're so highly intellectualized, so smart and calm and ineffable, that I forget how charged your life is with the sexual, the erotic, the lovely. Even if it's not the usual expression of personal physicality, the things you read and encounter and digest and share with me (with that little attachment of "this makes me think of you, a little" under lines about submission) remind me how dissimilar we are.

I could never have lived with your restraint, but I love the intellectual openness it's given you now.

listening to: All At Sea // Jamie Cullum
reading: Love and Death in Renaissance Italy // Thomas V. Cohen

maybe all we can do, is to see each other through

I created a book drawer. A drawer, under my bed, to hold all the books that were living on the floor. I also converted a hatbox into a little stool for my foodstuffs (also former denizens of the floor).

I love it.

In other news it is raining and I want you to pick up your phone so badly, Noni! (is it irreverant that I call you that? is it too familiar, or too childish, or altogether out of style? or does it make you miss me a little?) I need to tell you how I've been feeling. There are so many things I share with you that I don't have in common with anyone else -- so much life, and experience, and through all of that changing business you have consistently and lovingly been there.

listening to: Hour Follows Hour // Ani DiFranco
reading: Fearless: The Complete Personal Safety Guide for Women // Paul Henry Danylewich