Monday, June 29, 2009

The rocky path after college: who, what, where, when and why?




Maybe I live two lives; One is the always together college graduate aiming towards a life of luxury and medicine, One is the delicate artist dying to run away from conventionality and webs that society has wrapped me in, I am the fly in some evil money web that numbs me and eats away at me until there is nothing but a sheep. I grow more and more blind by the day. "I'm not looking for a perfect, spotless ending to everything in my life," a wise old friend shared with me one day, "I'm not looking for everything to get laid out in perfect crystal order. I like uncertainty, I guess that way I can always keep questiong everything about myself and everything around me."

If I could go back to the moment I decided to graduate early and stay longer I wouldn't hesitate. Life is not like this, and my life is also only what I make of it. I dont have to have a perfect spotless ending, because I dont even know what that is. Expectations, expectations and fear are the mind killers.

Sometimes I sit with my friends and I wonder if they really know who I am, if I have been able to show that to them, or if I have been too scared, or too embarassed, or too insecure. Sometimes I let myself tell them small things, meaningful things, and at the end of the day my fear is to be judged, and I do not think they judge me for these things that I tell them.

My lover, my soulmate, the perfection found in a person like him, beauty before me like no beauty I have seen outside of dreams, again we are so far away it feels, I feel sick on the phone, it is horrible to talk to plastic, a small box with buttons cold in my hand is supposed to make up for the fact that I left the town and people who I loved to live here, to save money, to work at this job, to go back to graduate school, to...to...........be happy? I am not happy here.

My last week of school I walked across the bridge between kerr hall and porter. I stopped in the middle and took a deep breath and looked up. The trees were covered in honey light with mist, a biker passed by, and then a couple more students. four years flashed by: my evenings smoking cigarettes in the porter quad, staring up at each lit dorm window, my super single, bina, alyra, steve, lisa, charlotte, angus, erik, my friends in some way or another, as close as friends can be when you are thrown into a strange land living with those you party with. Sophomore year in the chestnut house, where I never felt quite right, and junior and senior year living alone in my studio on Laurent, my favorite home, greeted by Angel every day after walking home from the bus stop. Finally meeting my friends. Finally waking up. Waking into the beautiful dream.

This sounds sappy. It is sappy. Once upon a time it was not sappy, but the worlds people have stretched words and phrases to their ends in movies and tv and even this internet thing. I dont care if it is sappy though, that is okay in my book.

So here I am, in the moment, meditating on which person i want to be, which person I need to be - and deeply I know which, I know who.