Election international

Tomorrow, as you are all painfully aware by now, is the much-awaited inauguration day. While I am across the ocean, currently hunting for a bar or a friend with a television so I can watch Obama's speech with my fellow expatriots tomorrow evening (due to the time difference, it will be from five to eight pm here), I am thinking tonight about November fourth of last year.

My memories of the first presidential election during which I had the right to vote are decidedly positive, and also charged with feeling.

I remember walking into the polls, fixing the familiar middle-school gym with a direct stare, aware that history was being made. I stood in line and thought, most appropriately, about showing you the movie Iron Jawed Angels, about the sacrifices that were made so that I, and not only you, could vote on that day.

Exit polling was a whole new excitement for me, and I stood in the rain and did it, to the delight of a PolySci student in the parking lot. Then I ran back to the car, raving about how exciting exit polls were, and you laughed as we drove away.

That night there were two bottles of wine, the winning bottle and the losing one, a white and a red, and we curled up tight in the already-drafty living room and held our breath as the results came in, state by state.

It was eleven pm by the time that they called Virginia blue, and I looked at you, and you looked back at me, in disbelief and the dawning realization that it had really happened. We ran out into the dark street and set off fireworks, listening to the exuberant reveling that was starting around us, enveloping the two of us in a cloud of smoke and noise. I called my mother, woke her up, screeched my excitement into the phone over a bad connection.

We left the door standing open and I didn't hear a word of any victory of concession speech, didn't see the footage of proud supporters crying and laughing at the same time.

We stood on the corner of the damp porch and held each other tightly under the eaves, and I think I cried a little bit when I said we did this, this is happening because we're here.

And then I said something else, something I hadn't intended or even known I would say, the words tumbling from me into you like little birds, half-whispered in my second language (prettier by far than the first) and you stared down at me. Say it again, you said. And I did, brazen and eyes wide open this time, unmistakably there.

You picked me up and carried me across the threshold into the house, kicking the door shut as we went. We turned off McCain's concession speech and that was the end of that.

You're going to miss inauguration, you told me, and I just smiled.

And yes, I do wish I could be home to celebrate with the rest of everyone, but most particularly with you. It will be good and it will be moving and it will be unmistakably positive to watch it here, whenever I can, bonding in our little island of Americana one third of a world away. But it won't match even a quarter of the goodness of last November.

On an unrelated note, here are the songs that I have come to miss the most:
Babylon / David Grey
When You Were Young / Oasis
So Alive / Ryan Adams
Reva Thereafter / Girlyman
Live Your Life / Rhianna feat. TI
Wonderwall / Cat Power
Under the Table and Dreaming / Dave Matthews Band

All those songs that I used to play while I was driving and sing along with, drumming my hands on the steering wheel, constantly ramping up the volume until it filled the whole world.

Well, hello, you!

Here are the things you should really know:

Lyon, France is good so far. I would say that, for a girl with commitment issues and fears of traveling and an introverted nature, I'm adjusting pretty well. I've done a good job of making friends, I think. We're moving into an apartment today, but I'll still be with two friends, so that is good.

I never thought I would hear Taylor Swift over here, but I did, and I won't lie, it made me miss you very much.

Anyway, we're trying to organize, so off I go. New places, here we come.

Oh, and I discovered at dinner last night that one of the girls I am moving in with was, no joke, E and M's next door neighbor in Reeves last year. Small world, isn't it?

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

I leave for France in three days.

Pepsi is arranged for, with five different people on hand to ensure that he is cosseted, ridden, petted, fed, trimmed, and generally smushed with love.

Red Stripe and Thé will be delivered to the nest on Saturday, and my car will remain at my parents' house, hopefully to be driven occasionally.

That's the everything of value that I own; all of my sundry possessions that I can't take are staying in boxes here. Mostly books and fancy clothes, as well as school things and odds and ends that I don't need or can buy overseas.

***

I'm ready to go. As Rick said, I guess I'll find out when I get on the plane, but I just stood in a parking lot and yelled "I'll see you in France!" which pretty much sealed the deal.

And I realized that this is the beginning that is coming from the end. To be honest, this town is crushing me with thoughts and memories of you, and as much as I love home, I don't want to come back until my guilt and pain have lessened. The only thing I really want is time.

you take it on faith, you take it to the heart

A solid couple of hours of organizing and then I am off to the barn. Despite the sub-30 degree temperatures, "having" to go to the barn every day to feed Doughboy, Nan's adorable retired miniature showhorse, is a delight. My personal resolve is to ride Pepsi every day until I leave for France. There is something about being a part of the barn's literal everyday life that lets you see so much more than just your horse.

I'm in love with my latest mixtape and I've circled tomorrow night in highlighter on my metaphorical calendar.

I think I'm going to purge some of the old teenage-me things from my room -- clear the bulletin board of senior year's reminders (keeping those that mean something, like my first test invite in kendo and my bryn mawr acceptance letter), organize the standing bookshelf in a way that makes sense, leave some shelves empty.

Today when I made my bed I tucked the sheets underneath in the way that we do together, and folded the duvet back to half-length. Then I slatted the blinds, looked around, and realized maybe all I need is a more peaceful place to call home, rather than a larger space for useless things.

I'm wearing a new sweater, to top it all off. A splurge, but one I look very warm and collegiate and incredibly cozy in, and one I will probably wear on the plane to Lyon. Two weeks, by the way!

will you count me in?

I never know how to start these things. I can't sleep, which is the truth of why I'm here, lying on my back with my old glasses on, instead of the slightly different lying on my stomach with my eyes closed, sleeping peacefully.

The amount of work I am accomplishing is staggering, my commitment to showing up for things (classes, appointments, social promises) slightly less so. I can't believe it's already December, that month we loathe like no other. Even February, with its chilling rain and miserable shortness, doesn't approach this dreaded "holiday season."

I get halfway down the screen and realize honestly? I have nothing left to say.

Edit: I feel horribly sick and I know that it's my mind more than my body that is actually feeling this way, but that isn't making it better.

Here's hoping things get better soon.

maybe you were kidnapped, tied up, and held for ransom?

No matter how quickly I rush home from work, how fast I eat, how rapidly and semi-carelessly I fulfill the immediate academic requirements of the day, I am only left with fifteen minute breaks in the day.

With my whole heart, I just want this semester to be over and done. Even though I have so many things to do before January 5th, I would gladly take the stress of doing those, rather than the drawn out, burning out, endlessly aching feeling of these classes.

Among the increasingly impossible stack of everyday things that I am running after is now taking care of the sick. I am not particularly maternal by nature but I do know how to be humbly attentive, as long as my patience holds out. Every time you drift away from me in slight delirium, and I have to leave to attend to a thousand other things, I go slightly catatonic with hurt and silence.

I have never suffered from such a profound lack of discourse as I am experiencing right now. I lack any words strong enough to penetrate the protective shell of numbness, and its subset of warm affection, down to unspeakably blank sadness around which everything else rotates.

Reading old Charlottesville City School Board papers from the desegregation process yesterday at work, I contemplated why we are weak and amnesiac. I knew people mentioned in those bulletins, and I knew that they had been involved when I was attending the very high school that was to be the result of these battle lines. But how could I have brushed that aside so lightly? Why are we constantly apathetic about the very real struggles of our parents' generation?

And why am I not as strong or as self-sacrificing as my own actual parents? I still don't understand how they unrolled their private drama and still functioned as a unit, always overshadowed by our needs, constantly at odds with their own families.

Maybe I just had less to lose, or less desire to save what I had. Or more of a self-destructive pride in just being free.

a rebel without a clue

Last night was the first time I really talked, a full disclosure from beginning to end, and even while I was being held and cradled and apologized to, I still wondered if I felt anything yet.

Mostly I am just focused on getting through.
-through the hundreds of pages of reading I am behind
-through the raging cold/virus I am fighting
-through the mid-range steps of my meandering path to Lyon (update: plane tickets purchased!)
-through the massive piles of clean laundry, the lack of sleep pushing behind my eyes, the books I have to read that I can't even find
-through the clinging attachment that leads me to write French papers with you curled up in my bed, fast asleep with a stuffed pony under one arm
-through yielding, giving in, allowing myself just to be admired and stretched out and wholly decadent.

I'm skipping class to get homework done, which strongly suggests that I should go do that reading now.