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| 4.39 PM. I've been laying in the same place all day, trying to ignore the turning, twisting of my innards. I awoke this morning, feeling as though invisible, paralyzing fingers were squeezing and wrenching my guts from where they were meant to be. It will subside for nothing...
Jordan's in Battle Creek, enjoying dinner with his family. He wanted me to come, but I refuse to subject anyone else to my misery. They don't know their own fortune, by my not coming.
Still, I wish he was here. There's something so comforting about pressing my face against his chest, my head finding its place, nestled into the curve of his neck. His embrace is warm and strong, enough to make me forget the grinding discomfort of my abdominal organs. Or anything, for that matter.
[snooze]
5.28 PM.
Where is the sparkle, the mystery life once so readily contained and allowed me to glimpse? Everyday life is drudgery. It's empty. It's an endless wishing, "If only I were happy..."
That old sense of wonderment for me now seems only wrapped in wanderlust. A solitary jaunt is what I need; there is nothing for me here. I've seen different portions of the world in the last few years, but always in an American context, from tourist's eyes: Peru, India, Jordan. Wonderful places, but I'm tired of travelling the world in herds. It's nothing compared with the intimacy of being alone, of having to examine yourself out of a familiar context, apart from your friends. I miss the intimacy of knowing a place. How it smells, how it feels. How it works, how it speaks. How to stride to its beat.
My burning desire is to leave. To saunter through airports. To be edgy, to feel culturally awkward again.
Three weeks in Uganda. I can't wait. I bought the ticket earlier this week. I already know it will be unlike any place I've ever been before... Maybe I'll have something to write about again.
Remember when Hong Kong still felt unreal... surreal? When even after two years of living there, it still felt unfathomable that I could be standing in the middle of one of the most densely populated cities on earth. THAT was wonder.
Wonder. There's still a trace of it in Jessica's voice. That childlike excitement that I love about her. We spoke this week. She sounds good. Different; but you expected that, didn't you? Isn't that fear what prevents you from dialing her number more often?
She is still laughing, still stretching herself, still setting goals. She sounds very happy. She inspired me to greater living, and I miss her very much for that, for everything. Hers is a spontaneous and generous soul. I should call her much more often...
Between hallucinations, you are far away. If there is a God - and I do believe there is, whether or not my thoughts and deeds proclaim as much - I hope He uses me for good. For love. I will find Him again. I will love Him again. He will reignite my passion for those things my childlike self loved. Someday, when I'm out experiencing the world, alone - I'll experience Him again, too, without anyone else regarding my faith and what it should be.
China, after graduation?
It's easy to content yourself with the mediocrity of the Every Day. With the completion of the mundane tasks at hand. If things go smoothly for you, you call yourself happy. If they don't, you call yourself frustrated. If someone crosses your path, you call yourself angry. Once you exact your revenge, you call yourself satisfied. Sometimes delightful things will occur for a time: a person, a place, a thing, an idea - and you'll call yourself happy again.
But none of these are as real as they once were. They are drudgery. At my deepest core, I think I'm very, very unhappy, and it's hard to grasp why.
I'm bored with the conventions of the civilized; I want the wilds of the earth.
6.20 PM.
kathleendayle | | |
| It is a significant day indeed, that day when you close the back cover on the final page of a battered notebook. It is that day when a sense of fullness comes over you, a telling awareness of the past months, pregnant with words, and giving birth. The end, but the beginning. And what better a time to begin something new than in the Spring.
I wonder if we'll ever reach point when we'll say, "Now I am who I've become." I wonder if becoming is a destination, a place we arrive at. A finishing line. I doubt that it is, and yet I think about arriving there all the time. As if my journey might end somewhere; but in my heart of hearts, I don't believe it will ever end. And I pray that it never does, because the peregrine in me can't stand the thought of sedentarizing. The planet in me can't bear the idea of coming to a final standstill.
"Sometimes clashes of intimacy are necessary for growth," she said, and I thought it significant and profound. I feel so guiltless and free of my choices in the past few days. Liberated, really. Perhaps a little insensitive, even. Smug. Empowered. With every decision I make, I learn much about myself. And more about her, whoever she will be - in a year, in a summer, in a week.
We will get over ourselves, in time.
Let's talk about spaceships, or anything, except you and me - okay?
kathleendayle
PS: Read This. | Currently Listening
Numbers & Mumbles
By Say Hi to Your Mom
...and don't look now, but there's a spider crawling on the wall behind you...
see related |
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| "These are the canons of cool: There is no crisis that cannot
be weighed and solved; nothing can be acheived through hysteria and
cowardice; you must wear and show off your ability to achieve social
reconciliation. Step back from the nightmare. It is a call for
parlance, for congress, and for self-confidence." - Robert Farris Thompson | | |
| So... I was spring cleaning tonight, for lack of better things to do (stuck at home on Saturday night... *sigh*)
I came across a sheet of lined paper with my own, younger script scrawled on it. I have little recollection of thinking this, a very vague memory of writing it down. No date, nothing to tell me when or why.
I wonder if boys look forward to growing up the way girls do. Little girls grow up with stories of princesses being rescued by Prince Charming. They play dress up and can't wait until they can wear REAL high-heel shoes and REAL makeup - just like their mommies - and they hope the boys will like them.
Then they reach a certain age and they begin to live for those moments when they can just go barefooted and bare-faced, but they still hope the boys will notice them.
Geo says boys don't really think about the future that way. They spend more of their time thinking about the cool toy they're going to get next.
How unromantic.
kathleendayle | | |
| It's in those moments of spontaneous grief that you are most tightly able to grasp yourself. The culmination of academic stress, social anxiety, perhaps irregular eating and sleeping habits - all come to a head and an entire framework dissolves in tears.
There I am, clutching myself, bent against the cold, walking - nay, running - hurriedly, in escape of I don't know what... is it the cold? The stress? The thoughts? Hurry your body to slow your mind? Or hurry your body to catch up with your mind?
And before you know it, the cold and the rush are forgotten - not absent, just insignificant. You are yet in it, but no longer of it. And everything you have left to offer is the mascara displaced to your cheeks.
How do I explain myself? Big girls don't cry - they're not supposed to, anyway. Especially big girls given titles like "feminist." Those girls who pretend to need nothing from nobody.
And that's just the thing, isn't it? These titles bestowed like thorny crowns upon our heads. The Feminist, brastrap cinched about her ears; the Hippie, wearing that woven wreath of wildflowers; the Photographer, looking at the world through a reel of film; the Anthropologist, head wrapped up in social construct.
These are the thorns I wear, and I wear them with pride, but also with a delicate fear. They are weighted crowns, heavy, I bend underneath them. Some of them I asked for, some of them were stumbled upon. All were offered to me; some I grabbed too eagerly, others I took reluctantly. And all this is without mention of the Daughter, Sister, Girlfriend crowns; those are heavy, too.
Such titles are hard to live up to.
I look for love in all of them. I utilize competition in my quest for respect. "Look at me and my worldview; look and see what I can do; I am more a man than you."
And what is a feminist but an insecure woman? What is an anthropologist but someone seeking to understand herself? What is a hippie but she who entreats a simpler living? What is a photographer but a detached observer of other peoples' lives?
I take these crowns with some hesitance; I am all of these things, I am none of these things. "Worth" seems to be so tied up in productivity. Who I am is about what I am capable of doing. It's about how I use my time, how much I can absorb, what I can spit out, how much money I can make. But is that who I am? Is there no room in Who I Am for Kathleen's doubts and fears?
There is immense pressure on me to fulfill the roles that these titles dictate. And honestly - honestly - I do not believe that I do have what it takes to be that Researcher, standing at that podium, pointing to that screen, bringing to the Academic Table that new paradigm, construct, mode of thought. And it hurts that I may never be him, that I don't believe I can be.
But that Researcher, he has doubts, too, and they're not unlike mine. Though he accomplishes so much, he doubts in the ability of anyone to truly love him, ever. Why? Is this fear unfounded? Irrational? Or does it stem from the fact that we don't know how to love without condition?
All along I've been thinking that what I want is to be noticed and recognized and praised and loved for how smart I am, how artistic, how independant, how open-minded I am. But how can I be loved for any of these things? I will never measure up. I am only as great as my greatest fear.
When I finally fall in Love, it will be with he who takes that great fear, and holds it, tenderly, in his own two hands.
kathleendayle | | |
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