saturday, october 6 • • •

→    I love being an athlete, I love being on a team, and I love rugby more than any other sport I've ever played. but rugby today was not fun. at all.

we played east stroudsburg university. this is their first season in division one. I don't so much like playing division two teams -- they play stupid, bang-and-crash rugby, without finesse or strategy or beauty. it's sort of the difference between american and brazilian soccer -- you can win either way, but one is graceful and one is ugly. anyway. the whole thing was surreal from the start: their jerseys were red and black quarter-panels with white collars, and they looked like they had just stepped out of the red queen's court. they were also wearing shoulderpads (which are legal, but nonstandard) and makeup. I've run into the occasional rugby beauty queen, but never ever have I seen an entire team decked out in mascara and lipstick before.

it was raining while we warmed up. esu yelled and jumped in unison like a football team and we giggled at them while we ran chaos drills. I ate a banana while our trainer slathered icyhot on my pulled back muscle. the ref was late and then he demanded in a nearly unintelligible irish accent that we get the ball properly inflated. little things adding up to infinity before the game was allowed to start.

it started. they kicked off and within two minutes we were near our own tryline, slipping on the wet grass, scrambling with the wet ball. it got tied up and we were given the scrum. their scrumhalf was right on my tail so I dove backwards as I passed the ball out, and she tackled me cleanly as the ball left my hands. all normal; I expect to be clobbered after a scrum, and as long as I can get the pass off it doesn't matter. but as I was getting up to follow the play, esu's eightman ran up behind me and planted her knee hard right in the middle of my spine. attacking a player who doesn't have the ball is completely illegal, and incredibly dangerous -- I thought it was obvious that I didn't have it anymore, but I pointed it out anyway as I struggled back to my feet.

"oh, you don't have the ball?" she said. "too bad, I'm hitting you anyway."

and that was the game. the whole stupid game. they were getting low and beating us in the rucks, so I was frustrated with our own team for not playing as well as I know we can, but mostly I was busy watching number eight beat up on us. and me. with five minutes left in the game she came off a maul running weak and I made a desperate flying tackle, barely grabbed her jersey and brought her down on top of my head. we were both trapped in the bottom of the ruck, and while I yelled no scrummy no scrummy no scrummy! she twisted my collar into her fist; when the ruck broke and the ball was sent out along the back line, she held me on the ground and kicked me in the head. repeatedly. the crowd beside us gasped a little bit, and I yelped, but the ref wasn't watching (and he didn't seem particularly concerned with calling fouls anyway). she let go, and with sticky-sweet mock sincerity asked, "oh, did you get hit in the eye? oops."

I finished the game half-blind; now my eyelid is purple, my nose is swollen, my cheek is a little bruised, and still none of that compares to the blows that came flying from the other team's mouths. it started when they called our (half-indian) eight an "inbred brown bitch" and very quickly got much worse; our team was rattled and struggling not to sink to their level. some people laughed at their childishness; some got angry and wanted to get even; some just got hurt. I, white and untargeted, willed myself to stay cool while we played, but I was so so so angry that I shook uncontrollably while our coach talked to us, and afterwards, because I am not very good at being angry, I cried.

I have stars in my eyes but I'm not completely naive; I know there is racism and cruelty everywhere, even at swarthmore. but sports are supposed to be different. rugby is supposed to be different. we all come onto the pitch knowing that we're going to throw ourselves full-force into each other and the ground, that we need to support each other to survive, that we're going to party together after it's over. we play hard, we fight tooth and nail for the ball, and yeah, we hurt each other, but there's an underlying sense of respect for anyone with enough guts and heart to come out and play this game. or at least there's supposed to be.

as we were walking off the field, our coach came up to talk to me about trying out for all-stars. "that was a nationals coach watching today, you know," he said, and while I hadn't known and should have been flattered I just got more upset. I didn't want anything about that game to be validated by the presence of anyone, let alone a nationals coach, and I didn't want to think about being an all-star for a sport that tolerates dirty play and vicious talk.

what is wrong with me that I find it so unfathomable that someone would walk onto my rugby pitch with the sole intention of injuring not just our bodies but also our spirit? after everything that's happened lately, why is it this that's unbelievable?

at least we kept our dignity. I'm not proud of the way we played today, but I'm proud of the way we acted. small comfort, but some.
18:51  ...

friday, october 5 • • •

→    dear you
who taught me how to hold hands, to let my eyes speak for themselves, to love as hard as I only imagined possible, that everything is worth sharing

and you
who sat next to me behind our music stand, danced with me backstage on halloween, wiggled bare toes in time with my warmup fanfares

and you
who found me rooftops and skyscraper windows and laughed only a little when I grew fantasy wings, let me sleep in your lap, cried when I cried

and you
who left me hidden notes in the library, fed me perfect sticky rice, butterfly-kissed my sunburned cheeks, slipped me secrets wrapped in laughter

and you
who gave me something to hold on to, more hugs than I deserved, the words I needed to believe in, somewhere warm and safe to hide

all of you
who haunt me with your left-behind paperscraps, pocket-trapped smells, love letters, hand-me-downs, memories
I miss you
the way morning glories miss sunrise
21:07  ...

→    homework all night long. fell into bed this morning just as the sun came up. alarm went off at eight; I dutifully got up, brushed my teeth, took a shower (eyes closed, forehead against the wall, fingers trapped in soapy hair), stumbled back to my room. class is at 9:30. time in between for clothes, breakfast, email, textbooks. not for sleep.

but. I climbed back into bed anyway, careful enough to wrap my hair in a towel to keep from soaking my pillow but without the cognizance to put my pajamas back on, slept straight through breakfast and birdsongs and class and chiming belltower calls and the sun's steady ascent. up again, bleary-eyed, confused by being dressed only in tangled blue cotton sheets in full daytime, guilty for missing class, hungry for missing food.

if I had only known, I would have slept longer. until further notice I am in physics midterm hell.
16:25  ...

thursday, october 4 • • •

→    heart says poetry. conscience says physics. I stare at my reflections: double-smudged on the thick window behind me; sliced through the middle by a concrete column outside the window in front; crowned by overhead lighting on the computer monitor; faraway and recognizable only by the green of my shirt on the cross-room window; outlined in profile on the black glass behind the front desk; hidden beneath the shadow of my own hand on the optical mouse; just a blur on the back of the clear blue imac across from me. so much transparency, so many windows, but still I can look only at my two-dimensional self. (where are you hidden?)

physics. oíche mhaith.
21:20  ...

→    my god. it's full of stars.
13:24  ...

wednesday, october 3 • • •

→    in my dream I was lying on a hospital bed with wide straps pulled tight across my chest and thighs and ankles to hold me still, not that I was trying to move. everything was completely white and shadowless, so white that edges disappeared and the world felt two-dimensional, except my blood which was very very red and everywhere. I don't know where it was coming from but I felt it underneath me and I could see it in the very edges of my peripheral vision, dripping down to the floor in a little crimson river. there were five of me, really, and the other four were all dressed in blindingly white surgical scrubs, hidden almost completely behind their expressionless masks. one crouched down to collect my blood in a little bucket, swishing it back and forth against the stream to make swirling eddies. two more of me walked back and forth between the river and my bed, carrying the buckets, moving noiselessly but leaving glistening red footprints behind. they brought my blood to the me who stood beside my bed, who carefully filled a tiny eyedropper and held it over my forehead. drip. drip. drip. like chinese water torture but with sticky warm blood; I focused on the steely concentration in her eyes and I refused to blink, and the blood rolled down my temples and into my hair and out again to the floor, to the river, to the bucket, and back. drip. drip. drip. this is a threnody without music just like poetry is a song without music I said and then I woke up.

in the shower I sang the fifty-ninth street bridge song, because my subconscious is not as scary as it thinks it is.
11:59  ...

→    it's about time.
11:11  ...

tuesday, october 2 • • •

→    I love that I can still hear the entire wind ensemble playing in my head long after my fingers have stopped aching and my lip has stopped bleeding. I love that I can close my eyes and listen to that writhing, roiling minor chord and still get real goosebumps even though the only noises here are turning pages and clicking keyboards and murmurs from science majors who are determined to declare victory over their problem sets. and still everything is music, poetry, metaphor, light.

if you hold still enough I will turn you into a symphony.
22:08  ...

monday, october 1 • • •

→    I had outgrown my imaginary friends by the time I started grade school, but I had imaginary machines until just a few years ago.

after we moved away from new york I invented a virtual reality machine that would let the person wearing it experience the world through me. it could transmit thoughts and feelings too, but only if I let it. every morning when I woke up I would decide who got to wear it for the day -- sometimes a friend, sometimes my swimming teacher from the y, sometimes a relative, sometimes a complete stranger. all day I would process the world and temper my actions with the barely-conscious knowledge that I had no real secrets, and sometimes I would send messages to my invisible audience by spelling out words with pieces of my lunch or blinking in morse code so the world would flash in and out between letters. maybe it was egotistical to make someone else watch me instead of having a machine that would let me watch someone else, but really I just didn't want to let anyone fall out of my life and this way I would never have to face the reality that no such thing really existed, and we were irrevocably separated, like pieces of a broken iceberg drifting in opposite directions.

later I used the machine to justify my dangerous impulses, by giving it to some responsible adult so that someone would be watching out for me and could come to my rescue if I got in trouble. (I suppose I was an unrealized atheist even before it occurred to me that I could make up my own mind about god.) I was careful, though, and I always turned it off to protect my most precious moments of solitude, imagining how strange it must feel for the person on the other end to be suddenly surrounded by immediacy again, immersed in unfiltered reality.

I had machines that let me see into my own past through someone else's eyes, that poked me in the sides so I could stay awake long enough to finish the books I read in the middle of the night, that let me forget the things that made me angry at other people so I wouldn't have to hate them. some of them were beautiful metal towers twinkling with little green and orange lights and some were microscopic, hidden inside my brain and activated by a particular shake of my head or whispered word. but there was one I could never invent, as much as I wished and wished I could.

for as long as I can remember I've wanted to be able to telepathically share feelings, because as much as I adore words they are wholly and infuriatingly innacurate when they try to fit themselves around emotions. I remember one day when I had a bad day at preschool, a bad ride home in the car, and a bad walk up the driveway to the house, and nothing seemed to be going right even though I was wearing my favorite sweatshirt and I had kept it clean all day. I was sitting at the kitchen table scowling as hard as I could, and my mother told me, "audrey, I can't take your bad feelings away. especially if you don't talk about them."

talking is hard. and once the idea was in my head it would never disappear. I wanted a machine that would let me feel other people's feelings, their pain and frustration and sorrow and loneliness and everything that hurt, so that I could take it away from them and absorb it into me. I wished very hard for it; even years later it was still my second genie wish (after flying). I was sure for some reason that I could deal with it, that I was strong enough to feel anything and hold an infinite amount of emotion without crumpling beneath its weight. there were times when I was fifteen and it was very very very dark in the middle of the night that I would sit curled up on a tree branch just trying to remember that strength. and I did, slowly. and I still think I am that strong.

now, though, I know that no amount of inventing or conjuring or imagining will ever be enough. funny how that hurts.
20:01  ...

→    flipped the calendar page this morning, looked at all the perfect little right-angled lines dividing time up into equal-sized blocks with corners and labels, laughed because that is not how reality works at all. despite my lists and meticulously overflowing planner, days no longer exist, and life is just an exercise in finding somewhere to slip a nap in edgewise.
12:50  ...