Sometimes I get caught up trying to be too many different things for too many different people. I play a lot of roles in my life. Sometimes I feel pulled between these characters I'm supposed to be, or sometimes I feel pushed into boxes I wasn't meant for. Of course, this is oftentimes what makes life great, making yourself into what someone else needs--this can be fulfilling in and of itself. But when do you lose yourself in the process? Sometimes a role is meant to be temporary, and we grow out of what we needed at one time. It's still hard to let it fall behind you, though.

I can see the end of my college education approaching. I mean, not officially, but if I'm here for Fall and not in Barcelona, then I know exactly how the next year will go. It's comforting, but there's also a pull to the unknown. I want to grow, too, and I don't know how much more growth is possible on this campus. I don't feel like there's much more to discover here. I love, love CBU, and it makes my heart ache to think that I'll have to leave it soon. But there's more, right?

"I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads."

"But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red, and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of strong, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag, On the ground before you is the jumble it held--so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the basgs refilled without altering the content greatly. A bit ot colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps this is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?"

-Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me

"Poetry should be a shock to the senses. It should also hurt."
-Anne Sexton

And, as a continuation to last post,

I can't find that again. Even when I go home. I still keep having the feeling that it's me, by myself, in the end, no matter how many great friends I have. It's a little lonely.

I'm just off today. I feel like my worst sides have been coming out lately. I apologize to anyone who has had to endure this spilling out, and I thank anyone who can tolerate me during these episodes. It's me, not you, and this is no line.

Do you ever have moments, small, insignificant moments, during which you have a realization that this moment, this here and now, will be stuck in your mind forever? Here's a moment I always find myself looking back to whenever I feel scared or like my life is getting to be too much for me to handle:

I was laying on the floor in my mom and dad's room in the early summer. It was one of those lazy days that I had spent mostly playing in the cul-de-sac, and I was incredibly bored because I had already jumped on the trampoline and read and rode my bike and done everything there was possible to do on a summer day. The street I lived on had gotten to be too damn familiar. But back to the room: it had these light green walls, and there was an eighteenth century-style portrait of a woman on the wall that I always looked at, hoping that one day I look like her when I grew up, all soft, delicate hands and a small waist and flowing dresses. So I was laying there on the carpet that had been heated by the June sun. I was at the one spot in the room where it seemed like all the light was drawn to, where a rainbow was traced on the floor because of the way the light slanted into the room. I felt safe. I don't think I've felt that safe since that moment. Because there is nothing safer than being seven-years-old on the floor of your parents' room. Except for maybe being in their bed.

I feel like being back there on that floor right now.

Maman died today.

You know how there's always the inclination to avoid facing fears, just curl up into a ball and hope that you won't have to do whatever it is that you're afraid to do?

Yeah, that's pretty strong right now. There are a lot of things in my life right now that make me want to find somewhere safe, with everything old and nothing new. Just cling to the familiar.

But spring has sprung. Or is springing. Sorry about getting lazy with this blog. I've been feeling lazy lately, but in a good way.

The beach was...the beach. Being out there at night makes me think of all the ages that I've been on the beach at night, and how I felt differently about life on all those different times. I'm feeling good about life right now. The stars were sparkling above my head, and the sand was sparkling beneath my feet, and that seems to be what is happening in my life right now. I didn't know that sand could sparkle, but there's some kind of algae thing? Natural phenomenon. Anyway, everywhere I stepped, the sand glittered, and I felt powerful.

Why did they make The Stranger part of my high school required reading? I remember really appreciating that book, but I didn't understand existentialism and all that, and that's pretty much the main idea. I'm surprised they expect high schoolers to grasp that concept. I can remember writing a paper on the heat/color imagery in the book, and I was damn proud of that paper.

"Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no real than the ones I was living."

I still don't think I fully get existentialism. It's still interesting to think about, though. Pretend like I get it.

"Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom."

-Wallace Stevens