Friday, March 27, 2009

Romance and Goose Poop

The rain has returned. March refuses to leave us without another good dousing... The gloom has been hovering for three days, a mix of fog, rain, and mud. Things started out very chilly; the rain came with a sudden drop in temperature that made things even gloomier.

But I like the gloom sometimes. And yesterday I felt the chill start to melt a little. The air is softening up, making the rain less wintry, and more like spring. I do think there is something very romantic about a gentle spring rain, I said to my friend yesterday as we walked across campus. She didn't reply because she was too busy warning me about the goose poop I was about to step in. We then spent the next few minutes discussing the sudden abundance of goose poop that appears when it rains.

Such is life I suppose.

Now I have a weekend in front of me that (for once) does not include a paralyzing amount of homework. I don't understand how or why, but I may have more than the usual amount of free time this weekend. I have no idea what to do with myself. It's very unnerving. All the time my worries about the future and how fast this semester is going by lingers somewhere on the edge of my thoughts. I can't ever seem to reconcile myself to those two things. Which, I now realize, explains why I insist on writing about it all the time. I think that I have a vague hope that by writing about my anxieties I will someday write myself into a kind of peaceful understanding or acceptance... We'll see if that turns out to be a pipe dream or not.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Stories

It is strange how places can remind of the ways in which life shifts around you - almost without your notice. I am back in my old room, in the place where I used to write so much. I am sitting facing the same wall I used to stare at when starved for inspiration, looking out the windows that are so familiar, listening to the old silence broken by the low burbling song of crickets and frogs in the night. So many things are different and so many things are the same. Both seem to highlight the changes in my life, the changes in me. Some things about me have changed so much; some other things, hardly at all. Every time I come home I am conscious of how deeply familiar everything is, how comfortable and soothing. And yet uncomfortable... I still feel a little like a visitor here. I slide right in to my role at home, but I can't forget that I'll be leaving again.

Right now, though, I am content in the stillness and the solitude that is so abundant here compared to school. I like solitude, it comforts me. Solitude is exactly the thing that is nearly impossible to find living in a dorm, so I am trying to soak up as much as possible while I can.

North Carolina is such an odd place to live sometimes - snow on Monday, nearly eighty degrees and balmy by Friday. Now I can hear the chorus of frogs in the creekbed that tell me it is spring. There was never a sound so full of life as that one. It reminds of springs past. I am both eager for the future and desperate not to let the present moment get away from me. Spring is good for making me wake up a bit, but it also ruins all my focus for school. My academics have been uncommonly hard for me this semester. I can't wait for summer. Yet, I don't want summer to come, I just want this semester to keep going...

It's all very mixing. Like most things. I am realizing more and more how complicated it can be to get close to someone, how scary and new. But, oh, how wonderful and dizzyingly rewarding at the same time.

I am also realizing more and more how stories hold people together - common, everyday stories of The Things That Happened to Us, and Do You Remember the Time When? These kinds of stories hold my family together, they make up my friendships, and they grow with each day, creating layers of meaning and narrative. Slowly, these remembrances create the glue that holds people together... And perhaps it really is as Salman Rushdie said: that freedom means being able to tell your story without anyone telling you what to say or how to say it.

And maybe that is why I keep coming back here to write.