Oct 05 2008
Disconnect
I’ve been waiting for this moment since I moved in. It’s quite a jarring feeling and it always challenges the circuitry in my head. I remember waking up to it last year on the 13th floor and feeling like I was on a ship, deep in a foggy morning. The truth was, I was lost, I didn’t know where I was, and I wasn’t sure if I would ever make it back. A total disconnect from self.
Some mornings in Ithaca, the fog centers around the towers and engulfs the campus in this hazy white cloud. It’s really not a big deal, no major phenomenon. But I remember witnessing the whiteness as a freshman, on this same floor, and literally freaking out when I woke up to it. I was screaming just like my roommate had and wondering “where did the world just go?”
But it was different this morning. I already feel such a disconnect, the whiteness, the nothingness, the loss of what I know to always be outside my window (bustling campus, rushing students, large East Tower in sight). But it was really already gone.
I forgot to turn my alarm off for 8:45 this morning, and recently that means no hope, I’m up for the day and will surely crash earlier that night, but this morning, as I cursed my goddamn alarm for going off, I caught the outside.
And I was in such a disconnect with this disconnected view that I made some sort of connection. At least, one that inspired lethargy. So I’m proud to say I caught up on my sleep this morning and fell asleep gladly to the thought of nothing, and what I couldn’t see outside my window.
It almost took the pressure off. Or. Does that make sense?
The haze is still here now, but I can make out some things on the ground – cars, buildings, trees. Voice are drifting up to my room, that bounce off the balcony above me and create a sort of sound studio where I can hear every conversation clearly.
“Come on, Tom (laugh laugh har), We’re going to be late!”
Presumably Tom: “Aaahhhh, you go too fast!”
It’s kind of nice I guess – the ability to observe from my perch, unbeknownst to Tom and Fast Girl.
But I am still removed, even as all the objects of reality drift back. I can feel my heart the same way I can feel the tips of my hair growing in their split-endedness glory. And I guess that means I feel fried.
I feel removed. I haven’t felt the way I normally do, so respondent to my emotions and my sadness and giddiness and my hyper-ness and my plain excitement for just being alive.
I wonder if anyone’s noticed. I hope they don’t think I’m a freak, or weird, or un-sensitive. God knows, I am. I just have been really apathetic. Almost to the point where I don’t mind that my friends didn’t call Saturday night or that a lost friend ignores my presence in the hall or that I am for the most part neglected by friends from home and familial phone calls.
I almost don’t mind. Apathy. An empty room. Disconnection, you know?
I sort of got the feeling to write about disconnectedness when a random encounter with a stranger I met at, of all places, a socialist’s discussion over at the other hill, yielded a rather lovely and unexpected email. He was talking about writing online, and hey, I write online too.
But he said when his work was lost by the happenings of one very unfortunate digital journal, all his personal writings, it’s almost like he didn’t mind the glitch. There had been a disconnect between the person he was then and the person he is now. So why should the loss matter?
I completely understood him although I think he thought he wasn’t being clear. Then, I wondered how much I minded the disconnect in my soul too. The one that divides who I was from the undefined “then” to the present “now.”
When I came to college, I thought about re-inventing myself. I remember those questions:
- Should I lose 30 pounds first? Consider myself skinny?
- Maybe dye my hair for the first time? Give in to the temptation and be a beautiful red-head?
- Should I become so narcissistic that I associate only with Cornell boys and girls who are intelligent enough to appreciate Tolstoy?
Maybe then everyone will love me. Hmmmmmm.
I thought about trying to play the different role, like I remember my English teacher confessing to in high school. In my sophomore year she told our class about her regret but then justified it with a “well, everyone changes themselves before college.”
I guess I thought I would have to too. But then I realized, that whole transformation so many of my friends were counting on didn’t suit me. Why waste the collegiate years creating a new person when I worked so hard for 18 years on the one I am today?
The today is way gone. Today, a year has gone by, and just last night I wondered if maybe that logic had failed me. Maybe I was supposed to undergo some sort of change, some sort of metamorphosis. I could wake up one morning and be the Kafka-esque cockroach, or I could wake up in the bed of someone I wouldn’t expect to ever talk to, par example the classic jock (!), or I could wake up like I did this morning, feeling disconnected and reveling in the loss of space, in the void that surrounded me.
It’s such a loosely applied term of apparent denial – a void. But here I am on my bed typing, and there is the blank outside for everyone to see.
Can people see my blankness? Do they feel the disconnect? Somewhere between a North Andover actress/friend/high-school-sweetheart and college journalist/possible socialist/potential musician have I just become that disconnected loser who doesn’t know who she is?
The clouds are parting even more now, Ithaca is back. Hello IC. I just wish I had become something other than who I am today. But why do I feel this? I’m so confused. But, then again, is there ever a way to not feel confused? Maybe my entire life will be spent wondering when I have succeeded as the philosophical entity.
Or, maybe I’ll always wake up to the white void.
