home for the holidays
I’m back home. I haven’t been anywhere since I’ve got here, which is why I feel terrible.
Tomorrow I’ll see someone who meant something to me for a few months. I know where to find her, but she doesn’t know anything about me. I don’t know how it’ll go, but somehow I know I’ll be fine regardless. I don’t think it was ever really about her. It was about my inhibitions and learning to see the world again.
I wonder what older people know about forbidden love. I’ve only seen one half of the story. I think about the Janet Malcolm profile, It Happened in Milwaukee.
I see things where they’re not. On my desk in my dorm, I look for a card that I remember seeing there, only to return home a few days later and find it sitting on my desk, hundreds of miles away. I walk to my bookshelf in the room that I shared with my sister to get a book, only to realise that it is sitting in my dorm, unreachable. It’s displacing having your stuff scattered between two distant places. You never feel completely whole, but at the same time, your existence feels more preserved, like you’re always going to be somewhere and you can never disappear completely.
You collect things, a near stranger told me a few days ago. No, I started. Do you collect experiences, people, emotions? he said. Okay, I said, fine. I guess I do collect things. It reminds me of a quote from Sylvia Plath: ‘I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.’
I went to the bar and got an apple cider, my first time ordering a drink. It tasted fine. I felt distant and floaty, maybe because of the alcohol, maybe because it was late and I hadn’t eaten dinner. I walked back to my college in the dark, down a tree-lined street painted with shadows. I stayed up until the early hours of the morning that night, the time at which the late sleepers and early risers cross paths. I walked down the dim hallways feeling dizzy with tiredness.