Still Here

I am still stuck here in Pancake Hell, while my friends venture forth into the welcoming void that is summer. My Fletch poster still smiles back at me; my latest musical craze still fills the room every morning. When you close the windows, you can smell my laundry. The reek of old soccer shorts has come to permeate the air.

We lost our intramural match today. Right before they called half-time, one of their attackers got free in the center. Running harder than I had in years, I sprinted after him. I leapt at the ball, smashing it away from him with my left foot. Somehow, my right leg ran into his left thigh in the process, and I was catapulted over him. It was a vicious fall. The field consists of hard, scarring turf. I literally bounced twice before coming to a rest, the world around me a mash of night sky, floodlights and sharp green surface.

I am still feeling it, two showers later. I wonder if I will remember this as The Fall, the accident that forever reshaped my physical destiny. Will I require surgery? Will I ever run again? How sad it is that, at the age of 19, these thoughts cross my mind.

Listening to: Leaving On a Jet Plane - Bjork

It's Greased Lightnin'!

My last final is in three hours. My roommate is leaving today, and all her stuff is in a pile in the centre of our room. I took my posters down last night, so the walls are completely bare. Tomorrow, it will be like we never lived here, just another grey-carpeted white-walled, vinyl-mattressed, anonymous empty dorm room.

After four years of living in dorms, I'm still not used to this.

I'm never going to wake up to seeing the Potomac ever again. The sun's never going to do that creepy thing with my Black Cat poster, where it makes the cat's eyes glow at about 11:45am in the morning. I'm never going to be able to eat breakfast on the balcony next to my room again.

As soon as I began to remove my posters at 2:14 am last night, this 11' by 18' space started slipping away from me. Tomorrow it will be University Property again, being inspected for dings and scratches (that in any other home would be mere symptoms of being lived in) by dispassionate housing people with clipboards and mental calculators.

I don't even like Georgetown all that much. There is no other place that has made me as unhappy as this university, and I don't know why. Still, it's impossible to not let somewhere where you've lived grow on you. It's hard for me to not to feel bad when I leave, because like it or not, this is my home now. Nobody ever said you had to like your home.

This morning, I sat down on my bed and stared out the window at the river glistening in the sun, listening to Ryan Adams's "Oh My Sweet Carolina." This is one of the few songs that can encapsulate what it is like to leaving home without knowing or understanding why or what you're feeling.

It's been a very odd few days, really. Yesterday I caught up with an old(ish) friend whom I hadn't seen for a while. We didn't have all that much to talk about, really. The last time we'd seen each other, we were both in very fragile mental states, and now that we're both pretty much okay, we don't know what to say to each other. I guess we just don't have anything in common anymore, which is probably the best for the both of us; it's still sad though, because that little spark which kept our friendship going has pretty much dissolved, leaving two people awkwardly discussing the weather, vainly trying to find interest in each other's lives and desperately grasping at that fading commonality that our friendship had been built on.

Everything changes. Usually for the better, but the better always comes at some sort of price.

Tomorrow, when I close the door to this room for the last time ever, and feed my key to the appropriate bureaucratic machine, everything will have changed again. Hopefully for the better--so you just go with it, I guess, and try not to brood over what you've had to pay.

I'm really looking forward to London next year.

Listening to: "Oh My Sweet Carolina" by Ryan Adams (feat. Emmylou Harris)