saturday, may 19

•••    everything smells like dirt and sweat and dusty corners, because everyone is dragging out the things that sat neglected under beds and in the backs of closets and the bottoms of desk drawers, and because why should we bother to spend seven quarters on laundry when in just a few days we can do it for free again? the pile of unwashed clothes in my closet grows, the air escapes my bicycle tires with more diligence than I am willing to put into pumping them back up, the hallways fill up with discarded boxes and junk food and trinkets left generously for everyone who doesn't want them; entropy reigns even as we pack things into cubes and make lists to keep from forgetting anything. I was sliding a box full of clothes and cassette tapes onto a shelf in the storage room when a precarious pile of stuff next to me collapsed, and now I have a sore shoulder and a scraped hand and a slightly bruised cheekbone from trying, and failing, to catch them. probably some of my boxes will end up in an avalanche of clutter next fall, in spite of my efforts to keep them stacked and cornered nicely, because everything tumbles down eventually. it's the universe.

I have less than twenty-four hours to go and there is still physics that needs to be done. I don't think I've ever pushed it quite this close to the wire before. but if I learned anything in high school it was how to do things at the last minute, so I will finish, somehow.
12:26 PM +

friday, may 18

•••    it stopped raining long enough for me to walk home from the bookstore, balancing flattened cardboard boxes on my head even though the pressure against my sunburned scalp was worse than the sting of shampoo this morning, singing quietly but loud enough that people who passed me on the sidewalk didn't bother to pretend they weren't staring at me. sometimes I like the way my voice sounds all alone, where I can hear all the little flaws that make it special, like the wrinkles on newborns. sometimes when I sing I feel like I am being born, somewhere.

it still makes me sad to think about things ending and people leaving and me coming back without them, but I have physics to distract me. and I've inherited five new books, which is wonderful because there can never be too many books no matter what my overfilled shelves think, and also a lava lamp that will surely keep me from getting too much work done in my room next year.

the greyness of the sky outside is the exact same greyness that I remember from the insides of the brain I dissected two years ago, and again I feel myself pulling in two directions: I want to stay here with the people and the corners of everything that make me feel like me, but I want to go live next to the lights and skyscrapers and street musicians in boston, and I want to be done with work but I don't want to wait four months before there is more school and more rugby and more swarthmore. I fight with myself now just as I did when I cradled that in my hands as if I were holding a baby chick and wondered how different a scalpel could be from a steak knife, just as I do every day as penance for being human. funny how grey can do that to you, even though the color itself is a compromise between black and white instead of a struggle.

and in spite of that I feel strangely calm, as if I could lie here in my half-empty room for the next day without doing anything, and still on sunday morning all my work would be done and all my things would be packed just because my life has a tendency to work out in the long run. but that is wrong, perhaps a side effect of the other funny things that happen when my brain matches the sky, and so I will work now. or soon, after tea in the sahara.
1:32 PM +

thursday, may 17

•••    swarthmore is good at filling holes she said, and I said no! because in spite of my shyness and my attachment to solitude I am even more attached to the people I love, and I don't know how anything will ever fill the holes they leave. and I cried all the way home, and I don't care how ridiculous I am being, because... because.
9:03 PM +

•••    and bam, just like that my roommate is no longer my roommate, and my cheek is still burning where her father kissed me goodbye.
1:25 PM +

•••    well screw this! I am, apparently, not going to bed tonight; I am still full of adrenaline and energy and my pulse is counting out a frenetic street beat against my ribcage. I can barely type because my hands are trying to fly away from my arms like pheasants that explode off the ground just as you think you've tricked them into being caught. not that I endorse pheasant hunting; not that you care what I think about pheasant hunting in general. but yes, just like that, a sudden cacophany of thudding and flapping and feathers where there was perfect stillness before, my hands want to do that and fly straight away into the sky, but they can't because they have no wings. and there's all those pesky bones and tendons and stuff. agh! this is not productive energy.

I did decide that physics was hopeless so I've spirited that all away and hidden it under the bed across the room, and now I have religion paper stuff spread out before me, waiting. but maybe this isn't just about work; maybe I am panicking preemptively in anticipation of departures. tonight is my roommate's last night here but for all intents and purposes she is gone, spending her last twelve hours on campus with her boy, having already stripped her side of the room of its decorations and lived-in-ness, leaving it funny and lopsided and echoing. and me, leaving in three and a half days and with so much left to do I can't see the spots in which to fit necessary errands and even more necessary people-visits, but seeing at the same time how far I will get knocked off my equilibrium-axis if I leave my goodbyes to imagination and abridging, if I don't force these words off my tongue, because no one knows better than I how many words have been trapped there before, and endings are not the time to bow before the sadistic and slippery mistress that is my own wretched shy insecurity. and somehow no matter how I choose my music, even when I spin around eyes closed and let my finger land on an unknown plastic spine as I try not to fall over or bruise my shins against the bed or knock the trinkets off my bookshelf, everything I listen to reminds me of someone who will be gone next fall. hopeless, this. my heart is playing double-time triplets, the kind you must flutter tongue even though it takes hours and hours of practice that make the corners of your mouth bleed, and still my hands are frantic. and I see the molecules of the world all vibrating in time with my anxiety, and I see the spaces between the electrons and the nuclei that make up reality. form in emptiness, like the spaces where we breathe between words and the air inside a potter's clay.

but now, now it is quarter-after-two in the morning and the people who are oblivious to my little midnight melodrama written by their impending absence are asleep, as I should be, but no matter; I have slept far too much, perhaps even enough to have a positive balance in the sleep account for the first time in four months, blaming it on residual illness when perhaps it was little more than laziness and self-indulgence. so I will write papers, and so help me I will be finished with this class before the sun rises. yes.
2:19 AM +

•••    huh. I thought I was tired, or at least ready to go to sleep, but as soon as I was in bed I managed to give myself a full-blown panic attack because I wasn't working enough. my heart is still racing. ridiculous. work. scream!
1:11 AM +

wednesday, may 16

•••    I wanted to tell you a long story about a little brown-eyed girl and a dark window and a dead bird, but like everything else lately it seems to be beyond my ability to properly articulate. I will say that the bird was a goldfinch, no longer warm but not yet stiff with rigor mortis, and that when I picked it up between my two middle fingers it felt almost too slight and soft to have ever been alive. but it had, and we both knew it, me and the three-year-old who crouched next to me on the grass, and there were no right words then, either.
9:00 PM +

•••    I changed my mind. time is moving too quickly.

today is the last wednesday I will ever be a college sophomore, and also the day I am doing my quantum mechanics exam. see you when I see you.
9:59 AM +

tuesday, may 15

•••    I've been thinking all day about what I can possibly say, and I haven't come up with anything. but you know what? you don't need me to tell you special kaycee was, or how much she will be missed. so I will keep my quiet remembrance of her here, by myself, where it feels right.
10:45 PM +

•••    this afternoon I was sitting in the meadow next to crumhenge with peter, trying not to be conscious of the things I was going to write down later and being only sort of successful. so now I don't know what to write, but here is the image I can feel in my synapses: me in layers, from the glow of the sun in my eyelashes, through the escaped hair blowing in front of my face, through again the palindrome-reflection of my same-only-not-same hair and eyelashes, to my own eyes watching me from the green-gloss mirror of his guitar.

and I know I've said it before, but god I really love to watch people make music. (peter, maybe you could tell.)
4:44 PM +

monday, may 14

•••    I held a corn snake tonight after dinner. she was long and a little bit slippery, cool and smooth the way all snakes are, with those perfect flat scales that always surprise you with their complete lack of slimy-ness. and when she wound around my arm I felt all her muscles, or maybe it was just one big long muscle of snakiness, and for a moment I felt like it was the hand of god touching me.

I don't believe in god, really. but I could imagine god in a snake. they seem the right mixture of alien and animal and inexplicable serenity all bound up in something that is both deceptively ugly and deceptively beautiful, powerful but also shy, with deep shiny eyes. and a forked tongue, but that is incidental, and it just makes god more interesting anyway. or something like that. I like snakes.
11:56 PM +

•••    remember when I went to chile? this is where I was. (the moon was full, so the sky didn't quite look like that. but the telescope did, except that it has aluminum foil all over the dome now so it's nice and shiny. I'm about half as tall as those doors you see at the bottom, so it's big. and the sky looked pretty damn cool, too, all upside-down and dark to my northern-hemisphere-city-girl eyes.)
7:32 AM +

sunday, may 13

•••    

who knows when this will show up, but whatever, I'm posting it on mother's day. this is one of my favorite pictures of me and my mother. I'm the baby. we don't know where the fuzziness in the picture came from; I suppose it's some sort of artifact produced by the light in the park and the film in the old camera, but doesn't it make us look like angels?
7:56 PM +

•••    people are packing and finishing and leaving; it makes me nervous. I still have two papers and two finals and two labs and five programs to finish before I can even think about packing, but the real reason it makes me nervous is that there is a finite number of packing-times left before the last one. maybe I shouldn't be thinking about that when I am just a sophomore, but I am dangerously close to being a junior, and things always seem to happen before I'm ready for them.

when I was little I used to lie in bed crying because I was afraid of growing up, and I desperately did not want to have to deal with the adult world, which seemed intolerably full of responsibilities and money and conflict. in sixth grade when all the other girls were sneaking makeup into school and testing the boundaries between sexy and slutty, I was conspiring with the delinquent boys to steal duckweed from the science room and being in painfully conscious denial about the imminence of adolescence. puberty to me seemed about on par with a death sentence; I was less worried about being a teenage girl than I was about growing up in general, but it got all tangled up in my head and when I was in eighth grade I was about the most androgynous thirteen-year-old around (except for my long hair and annoyingly babyish features). at our graduation dance, which I was required to go to because it came directly after the awards ceremony, I took off my green silk shirt and sat in the corner wearing corduroy jeans and a striped t-shirt, playing magic with that same group of delinquent boys that had nearly destroyed the science room's ecosystem years before. our teachers were sitting in another corner, and I heard my social studies teacher whisper to the others, "why does rabi always hang out with the guys? doesn't she know she's a girl?"

it took me until I was seventeen to really be okay with being a teenager. and now that I've finally caught up with myself and learned to be happy with being this grown up, I am nineteen years and nine months old and feeling the world start to spin out from under me again. I can't say that time is moving too quickly; high school seems further from me than kindergarten does, and in some ways I feel like a disproportionate amount of my life has been here in pennsylvania, certainly more than should be able to fit into twenty months' worth. but it scares me that in two more years all this might seem equally far away, and my life might be real and full without any of this college stuff to hold it together. so it makes me nervous to see everyone packing, because they're making the year end before I'm ready for it to end. that and the rotating earth. silly world.
11:34 AM +