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wBillieupool |
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Hi.
My name is Kate.
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wWednesday, May 09, 2001 |
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This is it.
Tomorrow: my last exam. Then I quit this place, and in a way I leave something very simple, a whole year of smooth white naivete, behind. I realize this and it's a quiet pitted feeling in the bottom of my stomach because I know it can only be more wonderfully complicated from now on.
(fire alarm. like a thousand mutant alien flies. the lights flash in the shadow-bathed halls: a surrealistic movie. I am moving slowly, eyes closed, my fingertips brushing past the concrete walls. into the warm-moon night.)
I strained the small of my back as I was hefting a gigantic tupperware box full of books into the trunk of my care. Who knew reading could cause bodily harm? My body so rarely betrays me that painful sensations sometimes confuse me. I hardly recognize them, and then I don't really understand that they limit my functioning capacity...so I try to do all the things I normally do, like the time I ran with that shin-split.
Today I said goodbye to Patrick and I thought: I'll miss you and Wes and the way you both make me feel like I'm worth all the ditziness and clumsiness just because sometimes I manage to convey a half intelligible thought. I also thought: you're even hotter than when I first met you. I will also miss Sarah, who has mysteriously disappeared in the last 2 days. I hope I don't leave without saying goodbye to her.
My room is unraveling. Soon it will be as barren and cold as when I first unlocked the door and stepped into its unfamiliar grayness. That first day I felt so young and out of place. Now I leave a room that has come to feel like home. I've also discovered that I place a great deal of weight in feeling at home even though I like to think home is something that doesn't matter, that if it changes so be it: I like change. No, I like the substance of memories constructed, housed, and aged. Now I understand that this little gray room is not really mine at all, so ladened it is with the scents of girls past. But I leave marks too...namely, my name scratched in ink beside the closet door. ;-) Sometimes I hate leaving...even though I've never really left any place at all.
Lucid was the day. I was too hurried to notice it much until after Bonnie and I left SAGA, and then I let the greenness below and the warm gray-blueness above surround me all within the folds of the warm summer-scented breeze. Sometimes I think it will be many years before I pass another time period of my life so...languidly. I've been saying goodbye for a long time now. Here it ends.
See you in the fall.
"What did you expect?" Ursula sighed. "Time passes."
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez--One Hundred Years of Solitude
posted by
Kate at 1:12 AM
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wMonday, May 07, 2001 |
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The nervous energy of today culminated in a surrealistic hour and 15 minutes while I meandered through the Pre-Calculus exam, the specter of which I've been maniacally avoiding and, at the same time, obsessing over for the past week or so. I failed it. I might have to retake the entire class, in which case I will close my eyes and forget what it feels like to have something leech onto me and sap all the realness inside, and I will work...hard. Perhaps by chance of miracle I've actually passed the requirement, and thus I can continue to ignore the place inside me that so fears my inadequacy when it comes to the logic of numbers. It's as if I fail myself when I fail these numbers. They're so essential to our basic existence as human beings and deep down I know this and it frightens me that I cannot understand it. I fear what I cannot understand. I hate what I fear. It's your basic equation for fool-hardyness...the demon that keeps superstitions alive and progress repressed. I house it. And I despise myself for that.
The day was so cloudy with muck: undercurrents of inadequacy riveting beneath my skin like the overcast sky above. So many days have passed sweetly here without memories of this. I so often feel squelched and suffocated, and today has felt, especially, like a dull continuation of such apathy, while inside: the erratic bursts of panic, like I know I've been stifled somewhere. There are times when I feel so alive and so real...and times when I feel but a mere shell of what I know I am, a perpetual hollow feeling: the idea of emptyness that so fascinates me. It has ever since I was a very small child, and I knew what it felt like to be very alone even among the comforts of family, especially with family.
Nevermind that. I am not afraid anymore of what the summer might contain. I am not afraid to leave the false security of half-friendships and a pseudo-social life. I will make a lot of money this summer. Pay off my debts. Spend time with my sister. Play baseball with my brother. Read. Tease my cat. Laugh and joke with my parents. Write. Take explorative walks. Jog. Play on my keyboard. Take pictures. Draw. Clean out my computer. Laugh. Work. Work. Work. Work.
Tomorrow: the cleaning up and packing away. Goodbye Katharine Billieu. You are not who you were.
"Remembering those things as she prepared Jose Arcadio's trunk, Ursula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out of her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity.
'Shit!' she shouted."
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez--One Hundred Years of Solitude
posted by
Kate at 11:05 PM
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Insomnia.
And I have a busy day tomorrow. I'm currently listening to Robert W. Smith's Inferno, which is soooooooo appropiate for my mood of impending doom...PRECALCULUS EXAM!!!!!!!! Bah! I'd take time to describe the intimate feelings of hatred and abhoration I house for any kind of math whatsoever, but I'm not quite up to it. However, listening to this CD of an honor band I participated in last year is fascinating. On the one hand, I have, if anything, regressed in my musical abilities (clarinet skills); however, just being a part of such a well-oiled machine as the TSU Symphony Band has created within me a musical ear that even I cannot deny. I hear with such accuracy all the flubs and intonation problems I amaze myself. I never thought I could hear so much within music before. I certainly didn't believe I was capable. On the same line, I've been piddling about on my keyboard more lately, and hopefully by the time summer's well under way I'll have made some progress in teaching myself how to play.
I am tired with no prospect of sleep. Summer looms...apathetically. I cannot expend so much effort this time around trying to expound upon that. I kept losing all my beautifully written blogs...dammit.
I leave friends behind. And a really great guy with a camera for a third arm who made me feel, for a moment, a bit diminutive and feminine again...and I really liked it. No, really, I did. I will miss him. I will also miss another great guy who's been making me laugh hysterically and ponder the meaning of life at intermittent bursts of frequency...I only know him through the internet. We've become great friends, and unfortunately, my limited internet access over the summer will keep us from talking until fall. Snail mail is still the most exciting and fun form of communication (in place of good ol' face to face, of course), and perhaps we'll keep in touch fairly regularly anyway.
So I thought I was going to write something fairly deep and beautiful, but really...I don't have very many of those thoughts in my head right now. Really, now I just feel slightly trivial and...awake, even though I wish to be asleep.
I wish I was alone, because I'm not...and it's with the same intensity that I wished myself with company just a few hours ago.
"I cannot be sure that I felt all that then, although I can be sure that it was in the fig tree, a few years later, that I was first puzzled by the conflict which would haunt me, harm me, and benefit me the rest of my life: simply, the stubborn, relentless, driving desire to be alone as it came into conflict with the desire not to be alone when I wanted not to be."
--Lillian Hellman--An Unfinished Woman
Goodnight moon.
posted by
Kate at 2:14 AM
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wSunday, May 06, 2001 |
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This is right. This is what I want. I'm lonely. I don't want to take my math exam tomorrow. Come on, I KNOW you want to take it for me. Look at you! You do! You know you do! Of course you do! :-)
posted by
Kate at 10:10 PM
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Ho de dum...yeah.
posted by
Kate at 10:03 PM
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ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I just lost PRECIOUS thoughts! PRECIOUS words! PARTS of my life!
DAMMIT!
This thing fucking timed out on me and LOST my post!
posted by
Kate at 9:38 PM
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Okay...here goes. I'm just incredibly stupid about these things, and I keep losing my posts somehow. Sooooo...what i'm gonna do is NOT TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE UNTIL I CLICK ON POST AND PUBLISH!!!!!!! Alright, I think I'm ready now...I think. Here goes, yeah...
posted by
Kate at 8:50 PM
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