I felt you in my legs before I ever met you.
The smell of new spike shoes always makes me giddy. Pliant, unblemished, and lighter than air, with no arch support and ten razor-sharp .3 cm long metal pavement-teeth sticking out from their turquoise underbelly. My mouth goes dry and my toes curl. They are still at factory settings. Perfection.
I think, sometimes, in that long rambling way people think things at 3 a.m. Things that shouldn't matter but do, maybe, because I've not slept and because I feel foolish and because the city-scape looks so surreal and beautiful against my trembling fingertips, ghosting the windowpane's surface and reading it like Braille.
I think this semester has been both easier and harder than the last, and I have learned something from it. I think I have a better grasp on my character, my thought processes, that intangible and ever-changing being that is my Self. I think I am beginning to understand my body's wants and needs; I think it's not built for running, but damned if I won't do it anyway. I think the days go by too quickly sometimes. I think there's no love lost between myself and Hobbes. I think I still believe in magic.
I also think I'm homesick.
That's not the right word for it, exactly, because it's not home I miss. Not the place, not precisely. I miss the place at a specific time in my life. I miss those unpredictable winters and humid, disgusting summers...I remember cross-country practice in all weather -- snow so heavy it was hard to see, sun-drenched tracks and that questionable water pump, torrential rains to ease the sting of August air. Driving to Calleva for no reason at all, except maybe to swipe old car doors and burnt rubber when the staff had their backs turned. Eating lunch on that terrace thing in the C-Building. Shutting my eyes and licking my lips and pretending, just for a moment, that my tongue was yours.
I was sixteen, then, and breathed a younger air...one of second-hand city smoke and hookah and inexperienced girls at parties, fumbling touches and giggling behind closed doors, singing an anthem of vodka in plastic bottles and cohesive bonding of glossy lips. We were just kids.
Being a teenager is so silly. Every little detail is Amplified, felt tenfold, written in CAPSLOCK on a chartreuse background and using boldface type. Everything is bright lights and converse shoes and home-dyed hair -- and parentheses, so many parentheses, as we struggle in vain to justify what we say and do. Each action is threaded with this feeling (fear?) of this-is-my-last-chance so we have to forever chase it, catch it, never let it go and never stop because if we do we might forget.
How could I think we would forget?
Midterms have started here and the campus is a thrumming baseline, guitar strings tuned too tightly, live wires pulled too taut. We evolve (like Pokemon) into dedicated hours, meticulous equations, and deadly verbosity...each word precisely and lovingly chosen over all others. I thought we were magic back then but I think instead we are magic now. Or magic of a different sort, at least.
We are university magic. We are graduation magic. We are future-doctors-lawyers-business-executives magic.
We are potential energy disguised as people.
This, too, is perfection.
I think, sometimes, in that long rambling way people think things at 3 a.m. Things that shouldn't matter but do, maybe, because I've not slept and because I feel foolish and because the city-scape looks so surreal and beautiful against my trembling fingertips, ghosting the windowpane's surface and reading it like Braille.
I think this semester has been both easier and harder than the last, and I have learned something from it. I think I have a better grasp on my character, my thought processes, that intangible and ever-changing being that is my Self. I think I am beginning to understand my body's wants and needs; I think it's not built for running, but damned if I won't do it anyway. I think the days go by too quickly sometimes. I think there's no love lost between myself and Hobbes. I think I still believe in magic.
I also think I'm homesick.
That's not the right word for it, exactly, because it's not home I miss. Not the place, not precisely. I miss the place at a specific time in my life. I miss those unpredictable winters and humid, disgusting summers...I remember cross-country practice in all weather -- snow so heavy it was hard to see, sun-drenched tracks and that questionable water pump, torrential rains to ease the sting of August air. Driving to Calleva for no reason at all, except maybe to swipe old car doors and burnt rubber when the staff had their backs turned. Eating lunch on that terrace thing in the C-Building. Shutting my eyes and licking my lips and pretending, just for a moment, that my tongue was yours.
I was sixteen, then, and breathed a younger air...one of second-hand city smoke and hookah and inexperienced girls at parties, fumbling touches and giggling behind closed doors, singing an anthem of vodka in plastic bottles and cohesive bonding of glossy lips. We were just kids.
Being a teenager is so silly. Every little detail is Amplified, felt tenfold, written in CAPSLOCK on a chartreuse background and using boldface type. Everything is bright lights and converse shoes and home-dyed hair -- and parentheses, so many parentheses, as we struggle in vain to justify what we say and do. Each action is threaded with this feeling (fear?) of this-is-my-last-chance so we have to forever chase it, catch it, never let it go and never stop because if we do we might forget.
How could I think we would forget?
Midterms have started here and the campus is a thrumming baseline, guitar strings tuned too tightly, live wires pulled too taut. We evolve (like Pokemon) into dedicated hours, meticulous equations, and deadly verbosity...each word precisely and lovingly chosen over all others. I thought we were magic back then but I think instead we are magic now. Or magic of a different sort, at least.
We are university magic. We are graduation magic. We are future-doctors-lawyers-business-executives magic.
We are potential energy disguised as people.
This, too, is perfection.