2001-06-23 :: 8:39 p.m.

tear it apart & make it make sense

Soundtrack: Boards of Canada, Music Has The Right To Children (borrowed from Josh); Weezer, Weezer (Blue); Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story - The Original Soundtrack Recording

Do you ever think about a person so hard that you begin thinking about their atomic makeup? Mulled over every possibility in a decision tree until all that was left was breaking the person into protons and neutrons and electrons and trying to figure it out from the ground up? I wonder how it is that I can consider someone for so long while they are probably asleep or preoccupied with something else. How can inaction be so absolutely involving? It's like Jenga in my brain.

I can feel time now, I can feel it pushing me, in between vertebrae, pulling muscle tauter over bone. It makes getting to sleep difficult, it keeps my feet cold, my calligraphy assignment unfinished. It makes little regrets sting. I've got a week left here, and then Melbourne becomes part of the recursive loop that is the past.

Okay, brooding. Okay.

I thought what I wanted to do was listen to some CD's, but I didn't, and then I thought I wanted to write, but I don't -- I want to talk, and I want the talking to work, the awkwardness to compel.

Jon has this beautiful sketchbook/journal with business cards and flora and coins and watercolors and various writings and portraits. Everything feels very in place and his art is fantastic, evocative. My journals are all words and marginalia, nothing I can show to a stranger (I mean, my paper journals, ha ha ha). The business cards I've collected (along with various other memory-triggering scraps) lie in a pile on my shelf, the blanket's shedding lint on the floor, my laundry isn't done, there's nowhere to sit besides the linty bed, and my photo doubles never got sent home.

Maybe I did want to write.

The leaves are almost completely gone now, or strewn in muddy patches on the ground, making a nasty bio-organic pudding. And now that the leaves have left, so too are the people. Yesterday was the official Last Day of College (unless, like me, you bought in for another week), and most students have gone home. So many goodbyes get left unsaid because people just don't like dealing with them or got caught in a rush or just forget. And then most goodbyes are bland, restrained moments, considered but never actualized after the "So, when are you leaving?" question comes around. I want people to feel it, really feel a parting; I would rather deal with it once in a strong moment and then let it go instead of feeling it peter out until I can't remember why I didn't want to say anything in the first place. But I think I'm in the minority on that, and I'm not about to force anyone leaving to have a goodbye on my terms. All of the inevitable loose ends remind me of Jessica's thoughts upon graduation from college: "...i'm afraid of the inevitable disappointment of losing friends who probably weren't really friends ever, but who could have been maybe if only."

Okay, okay. Okay.