October 30, 2003
Gentle
Driving past the College View Motel at 7:30 a.m., I allow my thougths to shift from being preoccupied about inevitable tardiness for Women's Studies to the soft fog of childhood memory, the iron fist of time gloved not in velvet, but in wool mitten.
I remember staying there one fourth of July, or about then. I remember the fireworks, mostly, and my brother and I with tiny hands clasped around sparklers, trying in vain to write our names with the fleeting light. The pool was scummy, Mom forbid us to go swimming in it. We persisted in wearing our suits, anyway, shivering as dusk settled around us.
We used to visit Miami when I was a kid. We'd go to Houston Woods, just outside here, and camp. Always I would peer out the backseat window at the red brick wonder that was the campus, vowing that this archaic beauty would be my campus one day.
So it is strange for me that I am here, that a pledge made eleven, twelve years ago yet haunts me, a specter of encouragement when I am grim about the face I see on every girl, the same one, the cold one so unlike my own, so unwelcoming of my dissimilarity. I don't want to be like them, truly, I just wish it weren't so obvious that I'm not.
Choraliers concert tomorrow and Saturday night, stranding me on campus. I borrowed Mike's X-Box for recreation, tucking Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic into my backpack; but it is truly him that I will miss, that I already miss.
I cannot explain what the sight of his slumbering face in the grey dawn, shrouded in an almost palpable peace, does to me. My heart cracks open, a different fissure each time, spilling the contents of my soul, sap and all, into the bed. The creases in the sheets made by my form are filled, and with his breath dried. An amber-coloured self has taken my place, I am the shadow of this resting figure, born of my sadness. I am the ghost, who does not linger.
So I drive, and I clamor about in my fawn-coloured coat with a scarf wrapped doubly round my neck. I see but am not seen.
What I would give for comfort, now.
astera at 11:43 a.m.