Oh Crap
I graduated today, and I even got hooded. This time last year was the happiest day of my life, so you'd think I'd be glowing today as well. Instead, I feel myself slipping again into my weekly ritual. Criminy! I really should start calendaring this insanity, like girls' menstral periods, to see if there's a regular pattern. On the bright side, I'm going home tomorrow, so it doesn't matter if I'm crippled with despair for the next day or two.
I'd like to think that I'm just sad because, you know, it's so hard to say good-bye to yesterday. I feel like I'm depositing my life into a glass box, like a diorama (sp?), and walking away from it. We say that we'll keep in touch, and that nothing will change, but I know this isn't true. I'll never be able to come back, anymore than if I was going to the moon.
Yesterday I saw Andres again for the first time in a year (sorry to embarrass you!). He looked at my bookcase and said, wow all your English books are gone. Yeah, I left them at home, I said; I don't study that anymore, remember? I know, he said, it just didn't hit me until now, that you've changed. And I KNOW we were thinking the same thing, as English majors, how my bookshelf was a metaphor, the visual proof for what happened to us. We used to be as thick as thieves. In a lot of ways, this hasn't changed. We've kept in touch often and discussed all the same stupid minutiae we always did; an outside observer would be amazed at how our conversations haven't skipped a beat in a year. But I knew that he just wasn't under my skin the way he used to be. I was different, and I feel like he was different too. Well duh, one might say. But it made me sad all the same. I missed our old friendship.
The fact is that proximity breeds closeness; you lose it, subtly, when you're not breathing each other in every day.
Meanwhile, I can't stop myself from changing - getting older, getting fatter, maybe getting wiser (or, just more boring). This feeling is especially acute during graduation, because other people are staying, and I'M the one who's leaving. It's like you get to see your life go on without you. Beloved habits, unfinished projects, bitter desires...I have to let them go and move on.
I'd like to think that I'm just sad because, you know, it's so hard to say good-bye to yesterday. I feel like I'm depositing my life into a glass box, like a diorama (sp?), and walking away from it. We say that we'll keep in touch, and that nothing will change, but I know this isn't true. I'll never be able to come back, anymore than if I was going to the moon.
Yesterday I saw Andres again for the first time in a year (sorry to embarrass you!). He looked at my bookcase and said, wow all your English books are gone. Yeah, I left them at home, I said; I don't study that anymore, remember? I know, he said, it just didn't hit me until now, that you've changed. And I KNOW we were thinking the same thing, as English majors, how my bookshelf was a metaphor, the visual proof for what happened to us. We used to be as thick as thieves. In a lot of ways, this hasn't changed. We've kept in touch often and discussed all the same stupid minutiae we always did; an outside observer would be amazed at how our conversations haven't skipped a beat in a year. But I knew that he just wasn't under my skin the way he used to be. I was different, and I feel like he was different too. Well duh, one might say. But it made me sad all the same. I missed our old friendship.
The fact is that proximity breeds closeness; you lose it, subtly, when you're not breathing each other in every day.
Meanwhile, I can't stop myself from changing - getting older, getting fatter, maybe getting wiser (or, just more boring). This feeling is especially acute during graduation, because other people are staying, and I'M the one who's leaving. It's like you get to see your life go on without you. Beloved habits, unfinished projects, bitter desires...I have to let them go and move on.
posted by Rex at 9:38 PM
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