because everyone has gone having fun without me & because the house is creaky and still makes quiet noises & because it is cold, too wintery & because the lightswitches are not working & because it has been a long day & because i have been sleeping so strange at night & because i miss claire & because i miss fairytales & because everything seems to be going sour today.
i am sad.
for one hundred reasons and for no reasons at all.
at least classes with names like: literature of the romantic period are good for some sad, poetry writing days.
heartstrings.
you are no longer
an all-consuming
deity
but rather a small thread
tear in the otherwise smoothed fabric
an irregularity to pull on and be,
simultaneously,
pulled by.
the things i freely give you stole.
last night we had a phenomenal conversation, in a cold car, about a lot of things like identity and sexual responsibility (things that have been weighing heavily on my mind these days) and it was so good that it stopped me in my tracks. i thought; this is why i can call you my best friend and my boyfriend. but this is a level of intimacy that we are not always quick to reach lately. i so often get that sense of disconnect from us. at the same time i worry it is my own insecurities of feeling closer to someone than they feel to me – i want nothing more than to push it out of my head. but there is always that nagging worry, i am so slow to catch the big signals and signs. the ones that come when one party is checking out, early, of a relationship. i am even more afraid to miss the little things. as always, i am afraid of everything.
if i only i could sit down with those two boys from my past (you know, the ones i gave myself to completely and without reservation) and ask all the why?s and how?s i’ve been meaning to all these years. if i only i could sit down with my nineteen-year-old self and explain to her that love and naiveté go hand-in-hand when you’re just a kid. and if you add sex to the equation, you might never get out alive.
currently i am living for british lit, circa 1920-1940 and it is what keeps me going. otherwise, i am completely enamoured with media theory, which happens to be a three-hour lecture on the life i am currently living (fantastically easy to live with/by).
i am also currently happy. or at the very least, getting a grasp on things.
i am now under the incredibly naïve assumption that the most interesting life i can lead is one well-lived. but i have no idea how not to be afraid of all of the things i love the most. the worst thing i can think of is doing poorly that which i value most.
i don’t want to do a disservice to people or things i love. i think this every day, so every day i will excel at the things i don’t really care about to keep my mind off of the things that i do.
i finished kurt vonnegut’s a man without a country. i can only hope that wisdom really does come with age and is not, rather, something ingrained since birth that i will never get the chance to see or understand. i want to make definitive statements and claims and create and know order and chaos and fluidity at the same time.
“i had a good uncle, my late uncle alex. he was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in indianapolis. he was well-read and wise. and his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. so when we were drinking lemonade under a lazy apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, uncle alex would suddenly interupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ‘if this isn’t nice, i don’t know what is.’ so i do the same now, and so my kids and grandkids. and i urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘if this isn’t nice, i don’t know what is.’”
