i've haven't wanted to run away
These days it seems I have to set aside the time for keeping in touch, writing it all down. I fear it will only get more difficult as the weeks progress (are there really only 11?), the work gains weight, and the days slip and fly by in glorious laughter, music, photographs, and conversations.
I feel like I learn something everyday. Not necessarily in class. Fuck class. They are wonderful, but they are not important. I have met people here I would never have met otherwise. And they are so very wonderful. The conversations I have had in recent days have been bursting with life, with discovery, with connections. This time of life - early 20s, you know - is ripe for curiosity and to set aside the bullshit and just be together, however that may be. And we alll want it to be satisfying and complete. So it is.
Every Wednesday at Oonder de Linden is Discotheque night. Last night, I dreamt of Discotheque. I love this night. There are 76 of us, you see. That is a rather small group. We do everything together. We eat, we sleep, we travel, we smoke, we walk, and we discotheque. Three facebook albums from a few hours last week. And crazy antics again last night.
There is frost all over the countryside. It's an incapturable image of beauty and pointed, deliberate perfection. So many images of late are just shining so much in life and nature that no painting or photo could begin to grasp it. That's what the mental pictures are for. And I'll take them anyways, sometimes, just as a reminder that I witnessed God.
My Tuesday this week was memorable. Highlights include:
Coloring in Tom's backpack
Listening to Jesse's iPod, gazing at the trees - the music blowing the leaves
Laughing so very hard
Interspecial communication with the black swan: she chased me down
The Tower, with Tucker
Gazing at the red motorbike tearing across the fields
Stumbled upon by Matt Starring and conversing so beautifully
Spinning in my room
Enjoying the heat and maternal nature of Jennie Palluzzi
Feeling the love emanating from Gaylon's mix
An overdue contact settling, and restirring, feelings
Dinner chat with Dinah opening doors to friendship
Questioning, inspiration, connection
So many people play music here. I love it. Reading Chekhov on the red couch in the green room while Tom Kelly croons or Tucker tickles the ivories with an original melody or Matt Starring strums or Alessandro harmonizes or Tara's voice lifts....it might be magical, as most things are here.
Last night, post-Discotheque, a group gathered in Sophie's to share cheese and nutella (our two basic food groups) and stories. Staying up in the living room and scampering upstairs to the warmth of my roommates (Melissa and I discovered that we were planning on wearing the same sweater last night: more proof of the bliss of our match up) feels like home, feels good.
This is Emerson School of Witchcraft and Wizardry:
Dulcia, as Dumbledore, runs off on frequent, weeks long secret missions, but returns to have every person enraptured
We have 4 houses (I am in Ravenclaw)
There's a dungeon
Huber, as Hagrid, is the groundskeeper and buys us drinks at the pub
Oonder de Linden must be the Three Broomsticks in our Well version of Hogsmeade
The Forbidden Forest borders the property
We have a ghost
Wands and broomsticks are on order
I couldn't be happier, it seems. Such a strange feeling, being so far - physically, mentally, actually - from everything I've ever known to be familiar. I haven't felt that homesickness yet. It will hit, I know it will, but I must still be in the haze of honeymoon. I wish so much that everyone could feel this way, that everyone could know what I mean, could be here to experience this with me, beside me. So there's that.
I just got here, yes. I don't want it to end. I don't want anything to ever end.