walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2002-05-01 09:45 pm
walkingshadow) wrote2002-05-01 09:45 pm
(no subject)
Checked the anthropology web site with trepidation, and found I'd just barely squeezed out an A with a hairline 90.6%. Absolute elation. I'll reluctantly and fretfully push through the crim chapters tonight and take that final tomorrow afternoon at three, a civilized hour to offer some sort of consolation for 8:30 classes, and falling much too short. I'll pack after that, and my dad will come up Friday to load the car to leave Saturday. And that, my brother said, is what you call a semester.
Jesus. Is that what that was? It felt more like a year of my life slipping quietly away when I loosened my grip and let down my guard. A landmark you don't realize is so far behind you because you've been facing forward this whole time.
Part of the problem is that it's not really a year, only two-thirds of it, a little more than eight months since checking in last August. But still. Freshman year begun and spent and ended. I would soul-search and ask myself if I lived it fully, but I realized in the shower this afternoon that it doesn't matter, wouldn't make a difference, the year would still be ending right now, right now, one second per second, regardless of what you did with it or through it, and the memories might have had different shapes, but I'd still be sitting here stunned.
Oh, I feel so mortal today. Old and aging and helpless, time is a frictionless slide, no handholds, and always steeper. I can never quite believe it when a year is ending. It winds and winds, the pace quickens then slackens, warnings are given, speeches sometimes made, and it's never real. I hand in the final paper and leave and stop short, suddenly lost when I realize I won't be going back again. It winds and winds, but it's never any preparation for the end when it comes.
When my cat is sitting in a dark room, I warn him before I turn on the light, but he's startled anyway, every time, blinking at me.
And it's suddenly very easy to understand why most people don't introspect, another shower epiphany. This whole past week of idleness and waiting around, of winding, I've crept cautiously over to the part of my brain that worries too much, testing it with the idea of finishing freshman year, of having that endlessly shifting set of possibilities cemented and forever behind me, and I'm almost devoured by fear. My mind's a whining little thing and can not reconcile this sense of time I keep trying to impose on it, passing time, passed time, limited time.
So the fear wells in me and I retreat, waiting for a better time, a more settled time, when I can handle it. But I realized in the shower that it'll never happen, I'll fall into that perpetual shying away and never confront it. It's like pain. Deep, gasping pain that you think you'll die from or never stop screaming from. You have to push it down, ruthlessly, get on top of it and isolate it, keep some lucidity apart from it. I conjure the picture of nineteen years falling away like water, of this particular year filling then fading; I tell myself that one day I will die, and I let the panic wash clear through me and the goosebumps rise. I breathe through it and the coldness settles in my stomach, a familiar sickly feeling. It leaves me thoughtful and aching, and when I feel like it's going to eat me alive, I drive it off with Carl Sandburg or James Herriot or maybe just crossword puzzles with my mother in the kitchen. But I can see where people might wander over to that inadequately fortified part of their brain and recoil, squashing that burst of panic before they have to reconcile it. It makes sense of the mid-life crisis, when so much time has passed it can't be ignored, and you have to understand that you will die, however cerebrally and disconnected. I hope to reach that without the need of self-inflicted chemical burns.
We drift down time clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?
-Tom Stoppard
Jesus. Is that what that was? It felt more like a year of my life slipping quietly away when I loosened my grip and let down my guard. A landmark you don't realize is so far behind you because you've been facing forward this whole time.
Part of the problem is that it's not really a year, only two-thirds of it, a little more than eight months since checking in last August. But still. Freshman year begun and spent and ended. I would soul-search and ask myself if I lived it fully, but I realized in the shower this afternoon that it doesn't matter, wouldn't make a difference, the year would still be ending right now, right now, one second per second, regardless of what you did with it or through it, and the memories might have had different shapes, but I'd still be sitting here stunned.
Oh, I feel so mortal today. Old and aging and helpless, time is a frictionless slide, no handholds, and always steeper. I can never quite believe it when a year is ending. It winds and winds, the pace quickens then slackens, warnings are given, speeches sometimes made, and it's never real. I hand in the final paper and leave and stop short, suddenly lost when I realize I won't be going back again. It winds and winds, but it's never any preparation for the end when it comes.
When my cat is sitting in a dark room, I warn him before I turn on the light, but he's startled anyway, every time, blinking at me.
And it's suddenly very easy to understand why most people don't introspect, another shower epiphany. This whole past week of idleness and waiting around, of winding, I've crept cautiously over to the part of my brain that worries too much, testing it with the idea of finishing freshman year, of having that endlessly shifting set of possibilities cemented and forever behind me, and I'm almost devoured by fear. My mind's a whining little thing and can not reconcile this sense of time I keep trying to impose on it, passing time, passed time, limited time.
So the fear wells in me and I retreat, waiting for a better time, a more settled time, when I can handle it. But I realized in the shower that it'll never happen, I'll fall into that perpetual shying away and never confront it. It's like pain. Deep, gasping pain that you think you'll die from or never stop screaming from. You have to push it down, ruthlessly, get on top of it and isolate it, keep some lucidity apart from it. I conjure the picture of nineteen years falling away like water, of this particular year filling then fading; I tell myself that one day I will die, and I let the panic wash clear through me and the goosebumps rise. I breathe through it and the coldness settles in my stomach, a familiar sickly feeling. It leaves me thoughtful and aching, and when I feel like it's going to eat me alive, I drive it off with Carl Sandburg or James Herriot or maybe just crossword puzzles with my mother in the kitchen. But I can see where people might wander over to that inadequately fortified part of their brain and recoil, squashing that burst of panic before they have to reconcile it. It makes sense of the mid-life crisis, when so much time has passed it can't be ignored, and you have to understand that you will die, however cerebrally and disconnected. I hope to reach that without the need of self-inflicted chemical burns.
We drift down time clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?
-Tom Stoppard