and now we're saying bye, bye, bye

so i'm taking a leave of absence from sarah lawrence. perhaps i just wasn't ready for it all. and by it all i, of course, mean the financial burden of graduate school as well as the mental toll that always occurs when i plunge headfirst into writing. i forgot how crazy it makes me just to put words on the page. how it makes me crave the past like a good song.

what's my problem with that anyway? 10 years ago, I looked forward. Now, I look backward. I can't understand it. It only makes me depressed and long for everything I'm going through now to have the same resonance as it will in a year. I view my life as this neverending slideshow of incoherent pictures. People become a fixture for a measure or two before ebbing away into their own adult life.

Yes. I am moving forward now, and trying to appreciate the present, but it's difficult. how can one appreciate what's happening now when everything around them could serve as a reminder? when a song you forgot existed suddenly leaps into the top rotation on your iTunes, forcing you to edit a mini-film together in your mind of all the mistakes you made.

Nothing makes sense. The only thing that does is the movie that forever burns behind my eyelids. The one that pushes and begs to be captured into word pictures. But I seem to be incapable of doing so beyond a single sentence.

All I'm left with are memories of:

concerts, when they were enough; audrey hepburn costumes; jack-o-lanterns burning through the rain; us trapsing through the muddy floodwaters, knowing this was the last time we'd hold one another close; ireland; the words, "your voice is important and necessary"; my incapability to stop the downfall; a close friend fading into the background of a scene, without so much as a word of thanks; my best friend and i unspeaking words in our very first cabride: the first taste of what we have now...complete independence.

and yet, these past couple months drunkenly blend together into a mess of craziness and tears even i cannot fathom to imagine witnessing. i'm better than that.

and here, my nose feels so cold, so red, so pretty pink in its gasping for warmth. i want to stay forever on the cusp of snow.