If I were to say that it feels like forever since I've written anything on here, I can imagine you pointing at your computer screen and accusing me of being Captain Obvious. My absence can only be explained by the odd absence of words; it startles me that I suddenly stopped writing in the amounts like I have always done. I have saved my words for the margins of my old novels with cracked spines and rough pages. I look back at my entries from a year ago and I still read the words of a lost girl, who does not know what to do with her life and how she will get there successfully. To write of all these deeper feelings is like admitting defeat, admitting with great reluctance that I cannot see how I have changed in this past year. Here I am, freshly nineteen, and I feel like I've failed at growing up. Doesn't anyone else feel this desperate, panic-filled cloud settling down upon them? This air has become humid with the summer heat and I am struggling to enjoy myself like I believe I should.
College this year has been equivalent to candy. Each quarter felt like a new treat, a new opportunity, and I would gorge myself with as much information as possible until somewhere along the line I'd become aware of the sickening twirl of my stomach. The worries would consume me. I'd question everything, lose all interest in the taste of such sugary goodness, and do my best not to admit how ashamed and embarrassed I was for not listening to my parents; I should have moderated my diet....and then it continues again.
What can I say for my behavior? Nothing. I cannot even appease myself. Therefore I read my worn copies of Anna Karenina and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and To Kill a Mockingbird and my latest obsession, Reading Lolita in Tehran. I read; I underline words that make me want to weep, that make me cry silently, that make my heart skip a beat with their lovely prose and the ordinary words that only have personal significance. I wish I had an idea for a book. I'd write it and prove to myself perhaps that I am passionate about writing but able and able to finish something, finish anything, too. I completely immerse myself in the fictional pages that are haphazardly stacked under and around my bed, and I write about it all in my little leather book.
This is my game of hide and seek: I take my little Italian-made notebook to whatever sort of place. I sit. I write. My observations scratch the surfaces of those creamy pages (with the black inked pen I had so meticulously chosen that morning) and I drink my tea or coffee in silence. And when you see me, approach me, strike up an ordinary comment that carefully follows the rules of conversation between strangers, At least it is not raining this morning...Were you in my last college class? History, right?...Do you know when the next bus arrives?... when you break my silence with your words I look at you with a smile and decide it is time to move on. I feel caught like a child stealing more candy.
How I wish I could moderate my sweets.
