collegiate diversion

Sometimes I look through my pictures. Often, actually. Not to remember, I think I do too much of that, but just to see if I’m actually envious of what IS me. In these captured images. It’s like if I can glamourize my existence, it will make me more grateful.

I’m not sure I have a success at this defense-mechanism-esque trick. Strange.

There is a picture I stumbled upon tonight, one I really regret tagging myself in on facebook this time. You and me, very young, and very happy. Well, you look happy, I look fairly miserable in this shot but I don’t think I felt that way.

Not smiling.

Or maybe I did.

I met up with my other-ex the other night. I’m still processing I guess. I still feel foggy about it. There is so much about that relationship, and him, that I don’t remember. I swear, if I have to hear one more word of encouragement that maybe he’s the ONE for me, this week (i.e. “Well, you were really happy when you were with him.), I will… ?

She said, “Well, you were very young at the time.” So that’s why the entirety of those 9 months felt like a dark and vibrant glass of red wine.

But, I was not as young as when this other picture was taken, this memory I have preserved so greatly: making out on the roof in a lightning storm, making pizzas on a grill and laughing with our friends. OUR FRIENDS. Funny how they’re not mine now, I wonder if they’re yours too.

I was 15? And I remember all of that clearly.

I don’t remember this other thing that happened when I was 18, the other-ex, during the supposed impressionable times. mmmph.

Amidst this photo, conjure-me-up DEBAUCLE, there’s a photo missing in all of this, the one I left in Ithaca, intentionally of course. I knew I would meditate on your face, masticate the memory, hopefully with the end of masturbating.

But I really can’t do that. Doesn’t Jack White say “I’m lonely but I’m not that lonely yet?” I just always think THAT would be sinking to a deliberate point of ultimate defeat. I have my own questions about publishing this one but it’s true. There are some women, I think, who just can’t masturbate.

I suffer along with them. I think it’s called suffering. Maybe that’s where I agree with Freud, I do think men have the advantage on this.

I can’t even meditate on one mental memory. So, maybe I intentionally blocked other-ex from my mind, just like I left that beautiful photograph behind.

Maybe the humans do have these weird habits, like the ones we don’t or won’t mention. The defense-mechanisms, and choice-words and schemas. The things like that.

This professor taught me that word, SCHEMA. I made a schema a reality out of a cliché, hoping that he’d fall for me eventually. It all feels so desperately tragic right now.

Just like meeting for a coffee to talk, and just like waiting for this guy, again, to go to the aquarium. We still haven’t, fuck.

And maybe just for me, this time, I’ll make myself a memory solo. Who said a girl can’t visit the aquarium by herself. Maybe one of the seals will ask for my number.

Hmmm, do they have seals at the aquarium?

My back aches like hell. I don’t particularly mind telling you this. Perhaps it’s the new mattress I am not accustomed to, or the 6 hr bus ride home that took so much out of me. Being out of college is such a weird experience.Like being out of your body, the one they told you you’re supposed to love and nurture.So, college student = vagabond, or nomad. (I’ve taken to mathematics again). You move from place to place, with little or no purpose, but always with the potential of growth. Why do we do that? When do you have time to settle?I’m not too sure whether I like being back home today. It’s beautiful out, everything in the city was blanketed. Here’s hoping for a white Christmas, I guess there’s just too much here.I spent a lot of the day with my brother, sort of a rarity for us, and Christmas shopping of all things. I mean, yikes! Talk about American consumption trifling two~fold because of stress and the holidays. Is it really so many days before Christmas? And is that such a crisis?I think I went into crisis mode tonight. There’s this great song that expresses a “fear of comparison shopping.” I think I finally get what that Metric woman was talking about.But being in the city, I also kept thinking I’d bump into you, oddly. Like being back here had brought me into something I didn’t want to know. What is it about the holidays that revives the ghost of Christmas Past? Maybe because you’re the only person I’ve kissed on New Years’ Eve, for all those years we fooled each other into thinking our winter solstice was such sweet solace.I miss you, but not nearly as much as I miss my best friend, I missed her even more when she wasn’t home tonight. With my sudden and random stop by the house, with my brother in toe, just to say hello. The rest of the evening just got more depressing from there.I really hate arguing with my brother. We can be pretty great together, mostly because he doesn’t judge me for being cracked out of my head. He’s one of the two people I can selflessly say think that I am cool. But that’s only because they smash that thought too often into my brain.I don’t know what they are talking about. Jeezzzzz.I keep thinking a lot will get better before the holidays, or during, or “by” them. I don’t know why we place so much importance on the spirit. It was the thing my mother softened the blow with when she told me there was no Santa Clause.“No Santa Samantha, but there is such a thing as the Christmas spirit that captivates everyone.”Is this Christmas spirit? Or did I just miss it?

Back home. Hmm. I wrote a lot before I came back to MA. I typically would have published a note about it but I have been going through a really rough time, one that included a complete nervous breakdown, self destruction, a fight with the person that means the most to me, some nasty names, some ambiguous emails and a cathartic destruction of the collage on my front door that I spent hours putting together and maybe just ten minutes tearing down at 5 am.

I am telling you all of this I suppose as a justification for the realization that I have no right to share what I am feeling with other people, especially the strangers. To hide my own humiliation.

Apparently, that is no longer the case.

I deleted a lot of notes off of facebook too. It didn’t make sense. Somethings have started to make less sense too, being back home.

The person I would most like to see seems to be indisposed at the moment, I hate how she can’t tell me why that is, but it’s good for me to go through the hard time on my own. I guess, doesn’t make sense though.

The person I emailed a few nights ago who never did get back to me, hasn’t been in touch. And knowing him, he won’t ever be. Touch. We don’t work well like that. That doesn’t make sense

And then, the person who had contacted me out of all of this is the person I would least expect, has been there. Ironically, he is not “back home” but in Ithaca. Shit. That doesn’t make any sense!

And I found out that he is married. Shit, again. I always seem to misread ambiguity. I don’t know why I convinced myself to start wondering about him, in spite of the age difference.

We eat lunch together, we talk constantly, we have intense phone calls out of our respective bedrooms, but when I finally put something out there that is so blunt, now I should be embarrassed entirely, he says: “And yes, I am married. That’s why I moved to Ithaca: So my wife could study here.”

Oh god, I am such an idiot! There’s something so beautiful in clichés, the one where the student falls for the professor, but yeah, I’m not his student anymore so, in the end, it couldn’t possibly work out.

Student + Professor = Cliché sexy romance.
Journalism Student + Her ExProfessor who is simply just a nice guy who likes to talk = NOT.

The best part of all of this is…I have strong moral convictions. He’s married, and that’s a dead end for me. Always. I never thought I would ever be at that point in my womanhood where I would have to clearly draw THAT line in the sand.

According to my six years self and her calculations, I would have turned into a princess at 16, been saved by my beloved after three nights of being locked in a dank tower, and married happily by college.

I had an interesting conversation with my mother about that. Many of my elementary classmates I know are married and pregnant now. Why did that seem like the obvious?

Why did things seem to work out at six? Now, at 19, my plan for a romantic and secretive engagement to my sexy ex~professor, detours through Europe and finishing my thoughts of expression on the couch in his office is entirely shattered. Fuck my plan. And my brain for ever making one.

Something’s happened, and changed in my life entirely. When I am in Ithaca, all I want is to be back home and with the people I know and love in MA. And then at home, I can’t really find my niche either, and I just want to be back in my dorm getting tipsy by myself and writing my own music.

I mean, god. Hopefully this will all shape up before the end of the month long honeymoon of winter and isolation. In that case, this probably isn’t a honeymoon.

I am going to visit Harvard Square, by myself tomorrow, that sounds fitting.