soliloquy for fall
Well, it's been awhile, hasn't it? Life has been all right, for the most part, and autumn has been beautiful. It's much quieter around here, now that Cathy's left, but it isn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.
It's funny, because for those last few weeks of the summer before Dartmouth called, I was terrified. I was absolutely convinced that it would mean the end of my world as I knew it, that once Cathy was pulled out from the foundations, my life would crumble down around me. Thinking about it now, it seems silly, and even strange.
The fear was unusual in both its timing and the strength of its grip on me. One would think that I should have felt at least the first tendrils of misgiving creeping about my heart when we hired a college counselor, but my chest remained unconstricted. One would think that they should have tightened about me when we went visiting colleges, but I still breathed freely. And even up to that point when clarion bells should have been clamoring and crying out their warnings to me, when she was accepted into colleges and had made her choice, I heard nothing and remained at peace.
And then, suddenly-I found myself afraid. I don't know how it happened, but all at once my head snapped up and I realized that things were changing forever, and that once September 12 came, nothing would ever-could ever be the same. My nights were consumed by the fear; I would rise from bed in the early hours of the morning to scribble feverish, forlorn words in my journal. I was obsessed. I had come to a crossroads, and yet I had no choice in which direction my feet eventually took me. This was an inevitable, inexorable parting of the ways, and the relationship between Cathy and me would shift irrevocably and be stretched thin between the two separate spheres we would henceforth occupy. She might have a sense of my world, but hers would be completely foreign and incomprehensible to me, and perhaps she saw a beginning, but I could only see an end.
Well, that's not necessarily true, because I did see a beginning too-only for me it was the start of something terrible. I could only see the first of a series of changes that would destroy everything, everything about my life that was comfortable and secure. I saw her departure, then mine, then my friends', and going to a new place without anything familar in sight, and on it went until I wound up alone, with no one else with me, no characters from the world I once knew to help me remember. I became complacent, I suppose, and stopped wanting more; I started wandering blind with my two hands held behind me, without sparing one to reach before me and feel out new possibilities of what the world could be.
But since she's actually been gone, things have changed; I've changed, or at least my outlook. I'll always be afraid, I know, but now at least my apprehension is tempered by excitement for the future. All of a sudden, I'm eager and looking forward to college, and to that new freedom and opportunity for intellectualism. It's a long way off yet, and for the sake of my newfound peace I can't look further than that, but it's a start. It's a start.
It's funny, because for those last few weeks of the summer before Dartmouth called, I was terrified. I was absolutely convinced that it would mean the end of my world as I knew it, that once Cathy was pulled out from the foundations, my life would crumble down around me. Thinking about it now, it seems silly, and even strange.
The fear was unusual in both its timing and the strength of its grip on me. One would think that I should have felt at least the first tendrils of misgiving creeping about my heart when we hired a college counselor, but my chest remained unconstricted. One would think that they should have tightened about me when we went visiting colleges, but I still breathed freely. And even up to that point when clarion bells should have been clamoring and crying out their warnings to me, when she was accepted into colleges and had made her choice, I heard nothing and remained at peace.
And then, suddenly-I found myself afraid. I don't know how it happened, but all at once my head snapped up and I realized that things were changing forever, and that once September 12 came, nothing would ever-could ever be the same. My nights were consumed by the fear; I would rise from bed in the early hours of the morning to scribble feverish, forlorn words in my journal. I was obsessed. I had come to a crossroads, and yet I had no choice in which direction my feet eventually took me. This was an inevitable, inexorable parting of the ways, and the relationship between Cathy and me would shift irrevocably and be stretched thin between the two separate spheres we would henceforth occupy. She might have a sense of my world, but hers would be completely foreign and incomprehensible to me, and perhaps she saw a beginning, but I could only see an end.
Well, that's not necessarily true, because I did see a beginning too-only for me it was the start of something terrible. I could only see the first of a series of changes that would destroy everything, everything about my life that was comfortable and secure. I saw her departure, then mine, then my friends', and going to a new place without anything familar in sight, and on it went until I wound up alone, with no one else with me, no characters from the world I once knew to help me remember. I became complacent, I suppose, and stopped wanting more; I started wandering blind with my two hands held behind me, without sparing one to reach before me and feel out new possibilities of what the world could be.
But since she's actually been gone, things have changed; I've changed, or at least my outlook. I'll always be afraid, I know, but now at least my apprehension is tempered by excitement for the future. All of a sudden, I'm eager and looking forward to college, and to that new freedom and opportunity for intellectualism. It's a long way off yet, and for the sake of my newfound peace I can't look further than that, but it's a start. It's a start.