January 4, 2002
Bruised
I've been wearing my hair like Pebbles lately. Without the bone, of course.
I couldn't get out of his car Wednesday night. I had been crying my eyes out for an hour, goaded by the sound of his heart beat at my ear, and when the time came for me to let go of his hand, to take one last look at his face, to kiss his lips and forgo that pressure until May... I could not do it. He told me to just go, that it would be easier, to just go.
I told him nothing was ever easy.
But I got out of the car. And I heaved my way up to the house and I shed tears all over my bed. And I woke in the morning with a heavy heart.
That gradually faded into familiar solitude.
That was overshadowed by distress all my own.
I suppose I have to get into it, reluctant as I am, but let me just say that I am smiling despite all of this.
I called up Miami as their offices opened yesterday for the first time in a week. I asked if I had been accepted yet. I had not. Because they had recieved my transcript from Ohio University which conveyed to them that I had failed all of my classes for not attending. So I call OU. And Ruth, a very busy woman in the admissions office, tells me that I have not withdrawn. That all of this time I have been attending (or should I say, not attending?) OU for free. That someone in that twisted web of collegiate bureaucracy did not do their job and process the paperwork I filled out in the first week of September. Nevermind the fact that I have spoken with my loan office, who canceled my financial aide because OU told them I had withdrawn, and that I have spoken personally with OU about seven times since I left. Did anyone ever mention the fact that I had not been officially withdrawn?
Not once.
So my withdrawal is going to take weeks to process, apparently, and classes at Miami start on Monday. So you know what Jill says?
Fucking fuck it. The system beat me. The man anal raped me. I will resign myself to the working populice for another semester and start school, as a freshman, next autumn. It can't get any worse.
But I quit Cappel's all the same. I don't need the money, and there was precious little of it anyway. I'm going to apply to work in Sear's Portrait Studio. I'll take pictures of crying little children.
It could be fun.
So Ryan is eleven hundred miles from me. And school is nine months from me.
Why the hell am I grinning?
Because he is before me in a picture frame, its edges lined with Pablo Neruda's Night on the Island, and he is in my heart, and though I say 'pididdle' softly to myself in the car, and though my fists itch to punch the shoulder that is not there beside mine; I know I will have this again. I knew the moment, or perhaps maybe a few moments after, I laid eyes on him in the airport, that miles and months amount to nothing in the chambers of my heart. And after a few days with him, I knew it was as well in his.
As for school, I'll be well fucking rounded when I go back.
And not just because the bruises from this beating may not have healed yet.
By the way, new layout pending, so prepare for an overhaul and a hell of a lot of mistakes.
astera at 11:38 p.m.