Where is the soleil...

Noah says, The storm is coming. I reply, I sure hope because its been dry as hell here.

I can't get that song out of my head, and its making me want to sing it as loud as I possibly can at midnight on Memorial Hill. Somehow I figure that will help me get rid of the worst writer's block to strangle me ever. Or at least it will give me a cold so I don't have to write any more bullshit papers for my seminar.

Or write anymore bullshit in general.

So storm please come... because I can say that I am thundering. I'm being filled with warnings that the storm is coming: a storm of words, a flood of realization, the death of some(thing), the survival of some(one). And I begin to see that these waters aren't drowning anything... they're cleaning.

Sigh. The eternal optimist.

When I Signed Off On A Delivery of a Ton of Bricks

I miss home.
I miss my sister.
I miss my mom.
I miss Leslie.
I miss James.
I miss Anna.
I miss my bed.
I miss my favorite places to eat. (Yes, I am that kind of person.)

I miss my dad.

I'm not unhappy, but I'm not steady.

When I Was Hitting the Button Really Hard

We constantly hit the self-destruct button. Unintentionally usually, but most of the time we have some sort of inclination that what we are about to do will hurt us in some way.

This goes for everything. In every aspect of our life, we find something that will send us running towards the hills and we do it. This is how we got to the moon after centuries of fear that God was somewhere in the skies waiting to strike us down if we ventured into his heavens. This is how we have vaccines, how we exercise to the point of near devastation, and how we smoke pot knowing our lungs are paying the price. Its a necessary evil in life, the corrupt good that lies in doing what we're not supposed to.

We learn. After so many times, the mouse in the Skinner Box figures out that when there is music the cheese is hard to get, and we figure out that we are not invincible, but instead adaptive.

So we give another inch. We learn that we can press the button for so long and still be okay. Or we fuck ourselves over by jabbing our finger against the button one too many times.

And start again. New button, new poison. You pick and you choose.
Self-destruction is just one second away.

When I Was Thinking of Them

I have nothing but an endless stream of words that leaves me breathing in so deeply as to grasp the full extent of their meaning. It is beauty and chaos, it is killing me but allowing me to truly live.

To philosophize is to die. That I truly believe, though my pondering has merely left me short of air, and feeling dizzy. How strange is it though, to not be able to control my bodies reaction to certain thoughts. Oh man, in all his foolish behavior believing he is master of the universe, and yet cannot truly control the eruption of a sneeze, the subtlety of a sigh, or the threatening watering of the eyes. I have learned never to claim that I have control over my body because honestly, I feel my body belongs to no one in particular, not even myself.

Perhaps it belongs more to others. I know that my mind is my own, for that is the only entity that I can truly embrace through reason. As for my heart, experience has shown that it is in the wind, in the rain, in the earth, in fire, and yet never truly in my body. It wanders around as lonely as a cloud, and occasionally settles itself on my chest, constricting any kind of movement, except for those which it wishes to pursue.

And thus, at this moment, on its own volition my foot is tapping away, constantly restless, constantly in search for a place to run. My heart is racing, for no one and someone in particular because although they may be a thousand miles away, my heart is there, in that warm and friendly (polluted) sky, waiting for a reunion with my body.

Although at the same time, a part of my heart was left in DC with Eric, and a part was torn away for the few minutes that I was in Philadelphia. That was truly astonishing though, how I felt a part of me racing towards my love, using my eyes to scan the area, searching for the boy who holds an incredibly special piece of my heart and soul.

Sigh. Involuntary or not, those sighs are signs that my heart is restlessly pacing back and forth. For whom? For them.

When I Missed A Feeling Forgotten (His Arms)

I'm up at 2:44 am on the day of my first college class. I'm supposed to be at The Moral Essay (english class) at 8:30 in the morning, ready for something... ready to learn, i guess.

Right now though, I feel like I'm clinging to something that feels about to be torn away from me. I am holding on to that image of me sitting at the planter, with all my friends, and with people who at some point were friends.

I can see it so vividly it feels as if it were a film on pause. Everyone, in my heart and mind, is stuck in that one moment. Actually, more accurately... I am stuck in that moment. I am trapped, so willingly, in that image that I wish could recreate itself.

I truly wish I could say that I am in love with college. For longer than I can remember, people have told me that I belonged in college, because high school was not the place for me. I was older, more mature, than the rest of my fellow high schoolers, and that was probably true. I am an old soul, I share something that links me to antiquities, but that also pulls me towards a new epoch in life.

But I don't feel that way. I miss my friends, I miss my home, I miss so much that it feels impossible that I would be able to let it all go and become something new. I know I am changing, and I can feel it. Thus the image fades. And as time goes on, the faces will become more and more blurry... the smiles will be less clear, the voices will not ring, and the colors will become a dull black and white.

The truth is that I miss everyone. Everyone. I miss the people I loved seeing and I miss the people I dreaded seeing. I miss so many moments. I miss Leslie jumping into my arms. I miss hugging James. I miss singing with Anna. God, I miss those things so badly. And they won't be there forever. Right? They will fade. Those feelings will fade because if anything, emotions are based in impermanence. I will no longer miss these things at some point... and that scares me so much. I will have changed more than I thought possible because the people who matter most to me in the world now will cease to be freshly burned into my mind.

I'm so scared that that will happen. I don't want it to. I don't want to ever stop missing Eric's smile or Abby's jokes or Jamie's judging, Tay's sarcasm, Azia's dead pan humor, Spencer's red hair. I don't want to stop missing those things because then I won't be me.

Thus I am caught at an impasse. To be happy, I must forego this constant ache that reminds me that I miss someone... but when that ache is gone I will no longer be happy that I have/had such wonderful people in my life.

And this is me. The college student. At 3 in the morning... hoping that she's in constant heartache. But at the same time laughing with her new friends.

I'm a myriad of things that don't seem to make sense... and I miss the people that know that about me.

When I Finished Harry Potter and Cried For James, Anna and Leslie, and Many Others

I sleep with my windows wide open because its comforting to feel that even though the world is dark and lonely, streetlamps are on to illuminate people’s ways on even the darkest of nights. Though I may be laying down, blanket warming me, and my head softly resting on a pillow, there are others that are still out there wandering, eventually, and hopefully, finding their way home.

We anticipated that life doesn’t end when the sun sets, and that life always seems to be more interesting at night, and thus we placed streetlamps on corners, along streets, to keep us from being lost. Its instinct, I believe, that truly prevents us from ever really being lost, because at every moment, and ever second we have been psychologically trained to survive. How did we ever manage to beat out the wooly mammoth or the saber-toothed tiger if we didn’t naturally just really want to live and see another sunrise?

This need, this constant and never-ending desire to breathe, to find light, is what brings love into your life. It draws people into your heart, and not because we consciously strive to find people that will guide us and help us, but because it is what we have done for thousands of years. A person lost is not one that doesn’t know where they are, but rather one that has lost all hope of ever knowing where they are. You can never truly be lost until you admit that there is no way that you can find your way, and when there are people in your life that act as guideposts you can never be lost.

“No man is an island, entire unto himself. Ever man is a piece of a continent, a part of the main,” preached John Donne. He said this to the knowledge seeking people of the Renaissance, people whose life was being affected every day by new technology, new art, new music, new ways to wage war, new ways to cure disease, new ways to die, new ways to truly live. Isn’t that so similar to the lives that we lead now? Everyday we are exposed to a myriad of things that make us happy, and everyday we learn of things that make us infinitely sad. There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t walk under the sun, and there isn’t a day that we don’t walk in the shadows.

Darkness. I seem to touch it everyday, and not in the ways that would seem most obvious, like realizing impending doom in the world, but rather within myself. Within us we carry an immense tolerance of pain and of happiness, but it is the pain that takes the greatest toll on us. You can drown in sorrow more readily than you can drown in the ocean, and yet we can survive. We can survive because light just seems to come amidst the major storms in life, and it just so happens that it can exist in the embrace of a friend, the kind words of a stranger, in the unbreakable bond between family.

This is what friends are. They are the streetlamps that keep you from being lost in the dark. Regardless of where you are and where you are going, they are there to keep you from falling off the edge of the cliff, crashing into a wall, or simply from succumbing to a darkness that could seem eternal. There is sunlight, sure, but when the night comes, rest assured that there is always light.

There is always hope. And so even as a child, when I was afraid of the dark, and now as an adult, when I’m afraid that the night will never end, I look at the lampposts and I fall asleep… because I am not lost, because there will always be a way to find my way home.

When I Was Leaving, But You Were Still Here

So I call it the “Going Away to College” Blues.

But really it could be the “I’m scared out of my mind, but not really” Syndrome. I mean, I always knew it was coming. Of course after high school had to come something, whether it was getting a job, or well, going to college. I pictured it differently though.

Here’s what I thought would happen:
I would graduate. I would be incredibly sad because I was leaving all my best friends, but we would hang out all of summer and every moment would be somehow more significant. We would all reminisce about how high school was amazing, but college would be better because some of us would be going to the same one, even dorming. I’d probably be going to Berkeley or San Diego, but maybe even UCLA. I would be worried because I’d feel bad about moving out of my house and leaving the family in general. It would be an extra long summer too, because class wouldn’t start around September. In the end, I would just want to be with my friends all the time, and perhaps even a boy, enjoying what was left of being a kid.

Here’s what’s actually happening:
I graduated. I truly didn’t hate going to Granada because it was an escape from home, but still, I don’t have the fondest memories of senior year. It actually kind of sucked. A lot. I did well, and had really kick ass friends, but, I don’t know… something was missing, or something was altogether too abundant. I do want to be with my friends a lot, but as the date of me moving away gets closer and closer, I feel conflicted. People that I really love, I can’t seem to be around because I feel like I want to tell them everything. I want to say, remember the time that we… and then everything blurs together. Every moment that has past seems to escape the ability to actually be remembered, and I can’t seem to be able to pinpoint when and how we became best friends. And then there are the people that I can’t call or talk to that I really want to, because it just feels that they’ve already left.

Isn’t that strange? The past four years, I have wanted nothing more than to leave high school, and now I want nothing more than to just be back in that time period when all the people I know and I had a future together. I know its possible that I will still be friends with some of the people I went to high school with, yet… will it be the same? Next summer, will I dread coming home and leaving the people I will then have spent a year with? Won’t everyone feel that way?

I wish I had more time, is the point I guess. I wish I had more time with some people, so that I could know that we’d be friends in a decade… or even a year. And some people I wish I could go back and change certain moments. If this had never happened, would these feelings still be relevant?

I guess having the blues is complicated. I wish I had chosen my actions more wisely. But now all I have is the present, this moment right now. I have the future too.

Here’s what I want to happen:
I want to let go of all the bad feelings that I hold on to from senior year. Against everyone that I may have wronged (and I wronged some) and those that wronged me (and some did). I want to be happy. I want to be with Leslie as many times as possible this summer. I want to play Mario Kart with Jamie and James. I want to go with James to Italy. I want to dress up one more time with Anna, and go somewhere where we can talk about how much we love Cole Porter, and how we’re still completely in love with the Top Ten Greatest Moment Ever (she knows which one it is). I want to tell Mikey that I didn’t make a huge mistake when I had a crush on him junior year.

And yeah, god, there are a lot of people I’ll miss.

Here are some inside jokes/comments that well… are inside jokes/comments that only those select few would know:
“Hey…this isn’t my wallet.”
“I’m American, white, and twelve inches.”

That made me a little sad. But hey, they wouldn’t call it the blues if I was laughing.