I know I’ve been quiet lately. Quieter than usual. Quieter than I promise to be. And it’s not that I’ve not had words; I mean, some of it has certainly been because of an injury I sustained to my left wrist and hand in December, necessitating a lessening of my time spent typing, but… that’s not it.
It’s been reluctance.
I am looking down the line, projecting out to summer. It’s hard not to; it’s that time in Seattle where everyone is dreaming of the sun and long days. And me? I don’t know where I’ll be. For the first time in my life, the first time ever, I don’t know where I will be living in 6 months. I don’t know when I’m leaving here, going where, nothing. It’s just…blank.
I think, once, this would have excited me. Now, it makes me sad. It makes me not want to move through my day, as if my stalling would stall the world. As if I could simply will time to stand still, and allow me to continually exist not in the moment, but this moment.
A good many of my friends are people I’ve managed to maintain friendships with while we’ve had diverse schedules that don’t compliment one another. We see each other once a month, if lucky, and spend our time chattering via computer-mediated forums. But I’ve finally made friends with people who don’t do this, who don’t live life glued to their keyboards, who don’t reply to email at all times of the day.
Some of them – one of them – has become very important to me. He has wormed his way into most aspects of my life, bent me around his little finger, and twisted his life into mine like branches grown together…and I fear what’s going to happen when those branches get pulled apart in a few months. Or sooner, perhaps, if he does start dating (as we are not); something he’s not planning on, but who knows what will happen in three days?
I know that nothing can stay the change, that the only constant is change. I know this, intellectually. But the part of me that feels? It doesn’t get it at all.
Life, right now, is one stress on another. I think I could handle this if it was my only stress, the not knowing where I will be, the fear of losing someone dear to me. But on it, I have my thesis, I have his thesis, my responsibility to my thesis-pod, to my class, my graduate school applications and the nerve-wracking wait to find out if anyone will take me at all, the sudden lack of a job, my health (and lack of, at least in my arms) – the list can go on.
I guess that this stress, this fear, is the one my mind circles to because it’s the only one I feel as though I have a modicum of control over. It’s the one where I could walk away, I could leave, I could close doors and do my best to stop feeling now, instead of dealing with hurt then. To retreat, bring about and nurse the wounds I know are coming, and move forward and on.
Except I could never do that. I will see this to the end, be it tomorrow, next week, or never.
