the tragedy of college

in reflecting on all the events of last quarter, i can only feel that every day has been and is continuously washed away. each one is so unique and holds so many tiny, tremendous variables that hold so much weight to me. no day will ever repeat itself here, thus making it that much more difficult to appreciate each and every one; to be cognizant of each and every one's subtleties. i think of mike standing out in the cold just outside my door, waiting to be let in. he is wearing a blue vest, the same one that hangs in my closet now. i open the door and he hugs me with cold hands. such a small moment, but attached are the thousands of interactions we've had over the past 8 months, and all the future instances we will have together, not able to imagine how much each will affect us.

now he does not have to wait and shiver outside when i run downstairs to let him in. the weather is warmer now, and i'll never see him outside that door again wearing that vest. in months this will all be washed away into something else. there are no consistent boundaries. we are constantly in flux, adapting to the disturbances rather than maintaining a way of life.


love one. love them all.
lose that one. lose them all.

it's interesting how the night takes it all away from you. and amazing that you can feel so alone that you break your own heart and all you can do is sleep.

i found a way to escape

and that is to share everything that ever meant something to us with other people

to know that they think these things are beautiful, and whatever we shared is not just appreciated between the two of us.

this is how i'm forgetting you and it will work.

deftones, comfortable painful, comfortably painful nostalgia

i am the clasp on a tragic chain of events. which i trigger within myself every so often, right after happiness, and then one song, and then another and another until i'm back three or four years in my bedroom in morgantown with all the lights shut off, the curtains taped shut, and one cd for hours. and high school.

all this figuring everything out, all this absolute confusion of teenage years, such gigantic changes having no context WHATSOEVER. no history lesson before it all. and then him and something stable and something i'd heard of before and something that felt right and made sense and fit. and waited, and made me wait in return. and the wait was worth it because i proved love to myself.

someone tell me something that makes me more willing to forget people. i have a mission i have a faith of some sort, i'm sure you could conjure something up that fits into it and it would make sense and i could be a little bit more free from myself. i could make it make sense to myself, but i've got to hear it first.

control.
something 600 miles away and two years ago is controlling everything i do today.

why do we hang on to what was. why does it have so much significance in our lives today? because that's how we came to be this way. our personal history, our ultimate, inherent ego.

because it was first. and god how i hate it's so much easier to come up with all the justifications for why the first should remain the only the best, that nothing else ever could be.

i see the difference between death and loss.

"and not since you left, have the waves come." my mouth goes dry. i become convinced i'm going to die tomorrow, i forget living for today because today is just a few more hours without you. the rest of my life just a few more years as the entirety of sans.

everything shifts. behind, beside, but it does not tear out from underneath me like i wish it would. i'm asking for an earthquake.

march, this month of mine

it is interesting how college makes us define ourselves--to deliver personal statements, identify our beliefs and values. I have reached a point in my life where i feel confident to cement my character with a mission statement. But there is something exceedingly wrong with this finality. It's as if I'm leaving behind the essence of who i want to be--losing a sense of openness so many tend to abandon when growing up.

. . . . . .

so many changes a person can go through in just a few months. i think i managed to to entirely lose sight of love, and while i would like to blame, i brought the situation upon myself. and yet amidst the revalation and cycles my body overturns, here i am again sitting at the edge of this murky brown river feeling the way i have thirty times before. it's just that now i have one more experience, one more phrase to think about.

as i look up, i see the long-necked geese flying swiftly overhead. with my head craned up like this and the early spring cools settles in with the gray blue dusk, i think of camping at age five. the orange tan canvas tents, ties flapping in the wind. arms out, running running running down to the lake. the same coolness, the same cloudy dusk but it was summer, and i had no expectations. absolute absence of cognition.

and now sitting in this grass, out open in the cloud and comfort cool. i am oh so ever ready, expecting for a meteorite to come soaring out the sky, blowing it all away right before my eyes. and before i know it, me with it, too.

dramatic

How can we have created all this art without some of it being real. A trail of footsteps leading up to a lamppost next to the river. narnia or something like it. Show me, please, I don’t want to have to lose everyone before I know that’s true. Over edified, cultured cultured cultured, and the snow all glittery white. So glittery, only like this when I was little living with mom and dad and leah, we could walk to the park. Ice sculptures on the sidewalk one week every winter. I’d ice skate on the cement and it was cold and it was night and it was okay. Oh my god the flood of memories of childhood. They haven’t gotten ahold of me for so long, but now they are choking me at the neck. A tidal wave of tears and the insatiability

One of the hardest things to do is be alone. But one person will never be enough. Do we need other people? Is it a basic human need? i wish i was a writer. i wish i believed i could do it, was good at it.



This is what it feels like not to be in love. this is what it feels like not to be in love.
The hollow cover enormously frozen over the snow.
Rushing, scraping out a valley like a flood.
Lays still with the crisp wind ripping through places where birds songs used to be.
A portal and a black hole for our memories.

I don’t hear my footsteps anymore.
I just think of you during my walk home.
Or maybe all I hear is my footsteps.
All I hear is my footsteps trying to replace the thought of you.

Comes with it a cloth of fakeness gagging voices
wrapping like a blindfold round more and more faces
Tightening limbs to the confinements we create from being distanced.
Convincing us that comfort lies in convenience—
to touch only what is within reach
and pretend pretend pretend it satisfies.

With age our needs do change,
and we will settle for what is near.
We will press the truth down to the end of our boots,
rub it soft into the leather
so that it becomes something external of our minds,
and we can ever try to forget each other.

The light is dim in January, and I feel right to sit beneath it.

i loved you so what

oh, ani.

half radiohead baked

if you listen to enough of "in rainbows" it's just like getting high.

intake. expenditure. exhausted. elevated.


wouldn't it be nice to know who you are. wouldn't it be nice to be understood by someone who did once understand you.

if i dim the lights and fill in the gray area with "house of cards" over and over

i am motionless trying to become emotionless save for the calm.


"i don't wanna be your friend
i just wanna be your lover
no matter how it ends
no matter how it started"

but quiet now for quite some time, instead.

the same thing said different thirteen times

I feel most real when i’m sitting among a few good people. Smooshed in the front of a big white truck with a diesel engine so loud you can hear it rumbling five hundred feet away. I love it so much when you can be comfortable together saying nothing.

I am happy I can feel this way again, but at the same time I feel that it’s just another part of my relapse, my lack of progression to a better state of mind.

thinking about how ten seconds of your life could last you ten years. for me those ten seconds are driving through the Arizona highways, asleep in the back of our rented car, my mother driving, father reading his science magazines up front in the passenger seat. Everything sand and dusty red so so bright, just trying to live. And doing it so.

this blog is an excuse for me to live the life I do. If I write about it, if I KNOW what I’m doing, then it’s okay to keep doing it, right?. I am comfortable with fucking up because I know I’ll always be okay with living alone on a farm somewhere surrounded by nothing but corn fields. I wonder if this is a sad thing. I fuck up to forget about him, and I just try to remind myself that he’s never going to hurt this way, so I just keep going.

thinking about a Cincinnati rooftop. I think about Charlie brown and blue rooms and security and knowing another person. letters pictures tears heartbreaks. My body’s composted them, turned them out into a wail back in Morgantown at a birthday party, against the wall outside at one o’clock in the morning and it’s freezing and I’m pounding the wall because I know I’ve lost the best. Those cincinnatti nights years ago. What I took for granted while I told myself it was really everything else I should be appreciating. I feel like something’s been pulled out of my skin. Like peter pan and his shadow.

Hello twenty. Hello knowing who you are, being comfortable with yourself because that is right and comes with age. But so much is still tattooed into me. sometimes I think I could feel it all again with everyone replaced and new. But I do not deserve it, and I still could never forget the first time.

Sometimes I look at maps and it frightens me to know that you can drop your finger on that map and go anywhere it may land. You can go anywhere, pick up and start walking, hope people are friendly on the way down to the pampas of argentina. but just because you can go anywhere, should you?
And then I start to think about how you’ll never see every place in the world, you’ll NEVER read every great book out there, you’ll never meet the people who might understand you best.
All this while there is never a guarantee for seeing tomorrow’s sunrise.

yesterday. “what does that mean?” that means my father played that song to me when I was a little girl, about to go to sleep to his guitar chords.

My god, it is all going away so much so fast, but yet it is still good along the way.

USA, US, us, us, us, us, us

i met with my colombian professor again last week and talked about how everyone there is brought up to want to be shipped away. every time i have these meetings and ask my probably offensive questions, i always leave, still unsettled because i just want to ask, "So what the hell IS the government doing there?" i walk away shaking my head at all the things i still take for granted here. noted before, many times, but how can people emigrate here and look at us and not want to shake us, slap us across the face? i walk away loving the united states, appreciating, at least, that a few old men had the right idea at some point in our history. i'm not naive, i know how this country works, how it fucks people over and acts like a cement in the rest of the world's decisions. the CIA world factbook blatantly states that "The US has the largest and most technologically powerful economy in the world." go read some of the descriptions for the other countries, and then go back to that. the culture of entitlement and ignorance.

i wonder if i have an understanding of his place here based on my experiences of coming from west virginia. i think it takes an outsider to feel passionate about changing a place, and i certainly never want to go back there again. it's as if just being from there injects a strain of hopelessness in your blood. but to feel that way about a whole country? it should be noted that he's never downright told me any of his feelings about going back. i've never asked, maybe he doesn't feel that way at all.

swimming

i'm quite sure that the only person i've ever loved is gone, or, in other words, the only person i thought i could love again. i'm pretty young, i admit, and so this statement automatically loses some of it's grandiosity. but i have to be honest with myself. i have to remind myself that there's only so many times a person can fuck up before that opportunity should be sucked away from you. to be all too figurative, i've thrown that opportunity in the trash and lit it on fire. i've sequestered that fire's carbon in the ground.

at the same time I have never been more fanatically absorbed with every other aspect of my existence. amazing, the waves and undulations of our lives.

i think about how my german professor stood in front of the class and squeaked out that he believed life was like swimming, where we spend half our time day dreaming, our heads under the water, occasionally being forced to resurface for a breath of air.
i wanted to stand up and shout, "that's it! that was the most beautiful thing i've ever heard. my college expecations have been met, and now i can leave fulfilled."
the rest of the 74 journalism students just sat there, unimpressed because they had heard everything else he talks about before. all that uninspiring media ethics muck, yes, and i the lone, gullible video production major so eager for a kodak moment. but maybe i am wrong. maybe they stopped scribbling in their crossword puzzles for those few moments, and i was just too immersed to notice.

rhiannon

why do i keep believing in love. because i feel it minimally with a lot of people?
yes. we are typical. we have become stupid sex driven youth. morphing disgustingly into adulthood. we have lost each other, justifying every step we take in the other direction.

morgantown, seven thirty in the morning. along with the lone old jogger, I feel as though i am one of the few people to feel your sunlight this morning.

unbelievable

for months i prayed for my parents' happiness. every night, afterwards just thinking of what an impossible request that was. add to that the fact that i'm not religious.


but i think it worked.

stevie stevie stevie

i don't know what is going on in my life right now.
but some part of it is amazing.
at times i feel like i'm sixteen again, an inch away from total sublimation (a new word?)

what type of woman am i turning into? not one i'd hoped, i have to say. predictable? maybe so, maybe not. still so far away from being a good person, now there's just more proof.
and this song floods my body with my heartaches.

Now here you go again
You say you want your freedom
Well who am I to keep you down
Its only right that you should
Play the way you feel it
But listen carefully to the sound
Of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat.. drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost...
And what you had...
And what you lost

Thunder only happens when its raining
Players only love you when theyre playing
Say... women... they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean... youll know

Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
Its only me
Who wants to wrap around your dreams and...
Have you any dreams youd like to sell?
Dreams of loneliness...
Like a heartbeat... drives you mad...
In the stillness of remembering what you had...
And what you lost...
And what you had...
And what you lost

Thunder only happens when its raining
Players only love you when theyre playing
Say... women... they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean... youll know

pull me down south

Here is all this goodness. In so many different forms. If I believed in god, I would ask him to grant me the talent and the courage to show other people how to see it. but it’s just because we all have so much money here that we can have most of these joys. There is beauty in people. There is. Anywhere there are people there is a goodness that can be radiated. Why can’t we just do it a little bit simpler here?? Why do we have to go through all these drastic measures to roll back our heads and laugh like we didn’t know we could? Meanwhile my head is exploding, I am still feeling the effects of last night drowning my brain. Making my eyes dart back and forth between the window to outside and what I know I’ve done wrong, which lies in my heart.

How can I let myself have this?
I let myself have this because I am a hypocrite. I would love to convince myself that out of all of it I can emerge a virtuous person. That I can still be that ignorant little girl I was two years ago is simply a test of talent. I wish.

When this computer no longer lasts I will recycle it and it will be taken to china where children take it a part under extremely hazardous conditions to reuse the metals and the tiny little chips inside. They won’t be wearing masks and they’ll get the inks and chemicals all over their hands.

And I will buy a new computer.

How can we let ourselves have this.

My blood is coming out of my skin. My veins in my wrist are pulling me pulling me elsewhere. Pulling me down south. To a place where people don’t forget they’ll someday die.

i am so happy and i have done nothing for it. sometimes i just want to carry it all to sleep with me.

i am young, i am frightening

you will forget.
you will grow old.
you will not even recognize.







i am terrified.

snow white

Over the past two weeks I have had some wonderful experiences with people I hardly knew a month ago. And at the same time, I’ve pushed others away. As I sit here on valentine’s day, I keep thinking of a scene all too appropriate for the evening. That movie where they have their minds made empty, and in that one scene when they’re underneath the yellow sheets he says, “please just let me keep this one.”

It is interesting to me that the more people I hurt, the less I see in everyone else. Crowds of people and suddenly everyone is just untouchable. Maybe it’s because the more terrible you become, the harder it is to convince yourself you’re still capable of loving like you used to.

I have been turning my life into my favorite songs, wasting all this time I strangely have this quarter, making less sense of anything than more. Finally there is no song to which I can apply my life, thank god. And I am forced to reconcile the struggles in my head independently.

I love this cold. Beautiful night sky. A cold cold winter, all of us lying in a room as waves of electronic music pulse in the air. All smoking and inebriated, only human after all. I recently heard a talk about how it is only natural to drink beer and celebrate the change it brings over us all, the connections between humans formed inevitably because of it. There’s no way this speaker had risen above the reality of alcoholism, but I find myself only able to agree with him.

Since I read Ishmael, I keep telling myself that we are no more than the creatures we have selfishly awarded ourselves. These acts of god and sense of entitlement is the most dreadful act of man, and yet over the centuries it only multiplies throughout, into, and among us. It has become the natural world, but to remove yourself, to make things so simple also seems to strip them of their meaning.

For christ’s sake…it feels good to listen to electronic music. In fact, it feels better than classical music most of the time. How much more proof do we need that we’ve become something else entirely. Our DNA hasn’t been real for decades.
I’ve recently heard these past 200 years have been given a new name because of how much we’ve altered the world—the anthropogenic age…something like that.

All I can see in humans is our ability to love. Our most endearing quality. And yet I am so turned off by almost anything that tries to state it bluntly. Buttons, t-shirts, things like that. Not because they are materialistic, I guess I just can’t see the point in showing off what you believe; to remind people of the power of love is futile, you have to live it instead. But in the end, you can’t love them all.

What’s that Beatles lyric? In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. God damn. I can’t believe that band, and I have to admit that my minimal knowledge of john lennon gives me a hell of a lot of hope. At the same time, I hate this idea of taking love. How could a person even think something up like that? That it’s taken. I guess sharing is just a process of taking and giving, though, right?

like a map with no ocean

that line between love and hate thins when the people you love just become reminders of how much a failure you are.
no insight. no work to do this quarter, just sit around listening and dancing to the music.
i heard a fiddler player outside my window at 1 o'clock in the morning last night. he sat between two lampposts on the bicycle trail. you could barely see his arm moving back and forth with the bow. but as i leaned out the window behind the flapping curtain, there was just enough light to see him flick a match. a little golden globe underneath his chin for three seconds. and that was fucking amazing.

and all you see is all your life will ever be

I am my father's daughter. So much. From the length of my fingers to the curl in my golden brown hair. to the overwhelming guilt, the shame of never being perfect. ever ever reaching--a constant, unreasonable goal.
I don't want to be my father's daughter. Just lately I got another chance to experience simplicity and calm. Just this time, I can't let it go. I go back to whatever the hell last year was. my eyes closed whenever the people i was with opened theirs. stacked against a door frame lazily, displayed like the imibicle i had to be for a year to experience that kind of life because it was easy. About to fall into new lives as much as i could. yes. that was easy. Knowing the end result was to tear a little part of my morals, dignity and shame out of me forever.
Amazing how partial those memories are. Just like the little chaotic nightmares they were at the time. The only thing i've retained is the shamelessness, maybe. It's helped me to break down in front of people, made me want to scream at people when they put on too much face, bumbling about some dreary materialistic lifestyle as if it's something to live for. made me bawl my frustrations and embrace everything because freedom is the appeal of being human.

see the way every other half lives. i want to stare at city lights over the Baltimore Beltway, only cement and speeding cars underneath my feet as I stand fixed on the bridge, the gas fumes and the wind sucking the life straight out of me in a streaming horizontal fog.

i don't know if i see all that much beauty in truth. i think i see quite a lot of it in all the lies we can pump into our minds, convincing ourselves we're spending some worthwhile time like this. the unintentional will power within us all.

eating alone

As usual, I sit by myself toward the back of the dining hall. People look at me as I set down my tray and pull out my newspaper, feeling sorry for me, I imagine. Some of the nicer girls, I swear, murmur a prayer for me over their overcooked chicken and potato salad. Bless them, I think before I start to shovel a mountain of salad into my mouth. But there is reason behind my being alone. Truly, this is what I find most awkward—trying to maintain a constant conversation with someone else while eating. Especially with the foods I enjoy. I hate to have to watch their expression change as I dribble a mixture of cottage cheese, raisins, lettuce, and Italian dressing down my chin. As they try to ignore my feeding faux pas, and continue with their account of the day, maybe I reach for a napkin and knock over the three glasses of juice, milk, and coffee in front of me. Maybe I laugh at myself, or mumble an apology, only to increase the ever present food dribble collecting on my lower lip. This is what eating with other people is like for me. It’s just more considerate of me not to ask anyone to accompany me to dinner.

As I sit there, and occasionally notice as people stare or a glance at THE ONLY GIRL SITTING ALONE IN THE DINING HALL, I wonder if it’s more than my eating habits that have brought me to this state of solitude. Am I indeed very different? I may not be wearing Victoria Secret sweatpants stuffed into my Ugg boots, but I’m certainly not entirely out of fashion. Quickly, I do a once over just to make sure I haven’t committed a fashion faux pas, as well. My tapered pants are stashed safely away in my closet. I’m not wearing oversized glasses, and my skirt is a reasonable three inches below my belly button. All good.

But then I start to think of less shallow attributes, more peculiar acts of strangeness in which I indulge. Today I bought an eight-dollar bottle of biodegradable laundry detergent. Now, on this devoted trek toward environmentalist justice, I do occasionally stop to consider that there are just one too many options for the activist to prove him or herself. But if there is one thing I have learned from my father, it is that our guilt shall know no limits. I might be a poor college students with four hundred dollars left to live on for the next ten months, but god knows I will not be held responsible for the phosphates killing off all those poor darling fish and bacteria in the Athens’ streams. God knows. I shrug. Maybe it’s all in the music I listen to, and that my favorite playlist combines a selection of 1998 MTV Grind classics and a new instrumental cd titled "Monkey Chant." Perhaps.

I return to an article in the newspaper and take another slobbery bite of yellow pepper. My over salivation is a fortunate thing, I tell people. I will never ever ever know the pains of a cavity. Though I try to feel absorbed in the current debate over Hillary Clinton’s crying episode in the New Hampshire primary, I’m distracted by the conversations bubbling around me. I have to admit, every time I hear the mention of beer pong or flip cup, I feel more justified in my choice to abstain from conversing with almost every undergrad on campus.

By the time I’ve heard three accounts of drunken Friday night stupor I am nearly done with my salad, and happily notice I’ve managed to spread only about half of it on the table. I finish my third glass of soymilk (my mild OCD forces me to sample every variety the dining hall offers), and carry the tray to the conveyor belt. Before I exit the dining hall, though, I fill up my customary to-go cup for later night snacking. First goes in a healthy glob of peanut butter, a few sticks of celery, and a quaint sprinkling of granola to top it all of. Yes, you know I get off on my low cholesterol levels. I glance at a few girls, horrified by my concoction as they toast their little fucking English muffin pizzas to near perfection. I tear off a piece of celery, chewing noisily as I watch their mild disgust grow into complete and utter fear. They hurry off and leave me wanting to throw some ham and a few chocolate chips into my snack cup, just to see their reaction. Of course, I then realize I would also have to throw in some of my own dandruff, completing my transformation into that crazy girl from the Breakfast Club. Probably the only movie character I’ve actually felt a connection to. However, I resist this final temptation, accepting that it really wouldn’t do my reputation any good. Instead, I walk out of the building, hoping that, because no one in there has ever heard by entirely American voice, that they just attribute my strangeness to the thought that maybe I’m European.

the rain on the steel roof three stories above

During the times that I try to remind myself that my thoughts are not unique, I often try to picture the person who shares my life. I think of a girl about my age sitting alone in a second story room. The window she's behind faces a street in a small town; the square of it sets in ashen white wooden siding, and the light comes through in a fading white slant. She has long wavy brown hair, much nicer than mine. The walls, the dresser, even the bedspread are all a shade of blue or teal; she is listening to records. This is an image I believe I saw once in a movie--the girl a character I didn't even very well relate to. And yet she is what I always picture. There must be thousands of these girls in their blue rooms with their records and their notebooks. Maybe even some of them are sixteen, maybe others are sixty-five, or maybe thirty two. (We all share something and will never meet)

Those people must also be starting to question their self worth and purpose, must also be starting to understand that their lives are for loving. I wonder if they're all debating whether or not to embrace it. Eventually the only other choice to kill yourself if travels and new experiences can't fufill instead.


. . .


God, the heights and levels of relationships. So much excitement at first to cloud any fear or hurt. To kick all that thought of the future into a dustbowl at our feet, carrying it clear up to New York along with that prairie dust of nineteen thirteen, when the new frontier was roped off and set aside for preservation, and we decided to conserve what was truly good for us, not just exploit all the richness of the land to feed our hedonism.

and when you're warm, i mean really warm

sometimes i can't listen to John Lennon because the music is too beautiful. i feel as though i cannot say it is amazing, it is so spectacular. what it is is him. it is so much his own and i can't help but feel awkward trying to absorb someone else's thoughts. what a commitment, to put yourself out there for all these people to try and understand you. to relate to you without ever having met you.

New Years-
candle wax, mothers worry about drapes catching on fire. a short girl in a black dres with a crush. a clear shot of smirnoff, a dark room and some movement. cold. running. Loud loud loud. every thing every where but really it's just music and people all rocking and pushing together as one. Bartender. white dress. Line to the bathroom. Talked as if everything was just a dream. Treated everyone as if they'd dissapear in the morning with all the fake intoxicated closeness i shared with them the night before. that they'd bury it, drown it, three hundred and sixty five miles away. talked to someone about feeling a woman's stockings through her dress. it was one of the most beautiful ideas in a book i just read. you've probably heard of it.

Night drive. night drive. night drive. a phrase, two lanes, made custom, patented with my youth here. A town in which I was young and allowed to make mistakes. Now older, being durg down into the same mistakes twice over. Now it's time for everyone to feel as hurt and ashamed as i did years ago. now it's their turn to face the the music and i feel as though i am involuntarily playing it, screeching it shamelessly in front of their faces. Their failures, lyrics to the songs that open wounds.

It will be my turn again soon though. to face up, to feel the shock of failure. the circle is spinning. the cycle will soon land on me for long again.