"I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. "

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“You build your world around someone, and then what happens when he disappears? Where do you go- into pieces, into atoms, into the arms of another man? You go shopping, you cook dinner, you work odd hours, you make love to someone else on June nights. But you’re not really there, you’re someplace else where there is blue sky and a road you don’t recognize. If you squint your eyes, you think you see him, in the shadows, beyond the trees. You always imagine that you see him, but he’s never there. It’s only his spirit, that’s what’s there beneath the bed when you kiss your husband, there when you send your daughter off to school. It’s in your coffee cup, your bathwater, your tears. Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you, and a man who swears he’ll love you forever isn’t finished with you until he’s done.”

—	Alice Hoffman

So, here I am in Berkeley. The air is crisp and the city feels clean, and I think that means it's time for a new blog. I want it to focus on my experiences in this city as a Lasallian Volunteer, so who knows, I may keep this one up as well. I need a more linear blog that I can write for my family and friends, and also a more poetry-centered one that is more private.

Here is the link: http://angelaetoomer.wordpress.com/ Enjoy!

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

—	Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum)

Memphis wakes to a smell of hot tar,

to cracked sidewalks,

to the sweat and grime of a million tired souls,

scraping themselves off the pavement.

The wanderers,

the prayers muttered under breaths,

about this: "Let me be okay."

The tired, the worn out, the winding blues,

The neon signs,

The atmosphere heavy with exhaled wind,

From lungs that have reached capacity.

The smell of a morning that is hot, already,

The coffee in styrofoam cups,

The days that pass like beads on a rosary.

Please, let me be okay.

This period of transit is never comfortable, but I'm getting more comfortable with dealing with it. I've done a lot of moving back and forth in the past four years. This move is BIG, though. Big but also completely necessary and a relief, in a way.

When I look back at the person I was at this time my freshman year, when I was moving into the dorms and going to my first college parties, I hardly recognize myself. I guess this is a universal thing--and I am so glad I've changed. I think something is wrong if you go through college and remain the same person. Each year, even, I've become a different person. I'm glad I experienced everything I did in college. It was everything I wanted it to be, also something I didn't expect, and so much more. It's so very temporary, that strange college world, but it's a good thing that it's temporary. It had to end, and I wouldn't have done much differently.

I was on campus today dropping off some stuff/saying goodbye to college, for good, and I didn't feel this overwhelming sense of nostalgia. I was surprised. I sort of wanted some kind of catharsis, a big feeling for this place I've been for four years. Instead, I just felt this peace and acceptance that this era is over. I felt gratefulness for having been here. It's time to move on though. I felt the same thing when I moved to Memphis. It's time.

“Mostly we authors must repeat ourselves—that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives, experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise—maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.”

—	F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “One Hundred False Starts” in A Short Autobiography