The wings of a dove.
'We shall never be again as we were!'
Of all the times I expected to be next updating this journal, it was certainly not now. For the last few hours, I've been making one of my occasional journeys through the flatlands of the past (to me, all time, once traversed, seems a little flatter than it did before), perusing through my oldest entries and email exchanges as if they were the few landmarks still visible in what has become an adolescent mist. Each time I come back, their structures seem to be more complex than how I remember them; the hues, both visually and emotionally, are vaguer. I suppose that can be explained by the simultaneously keener yet weaker eye of experience.
The four month absence I've just returned from hasn't quite been the same as the sort from which I salvaged memories into the 'Long division' entries two summers ago, as I've continued to make notes the entire time. After all, I learnt last time that the finer details of my life will be inevitably sieved out no matter how much I try to preserve them, and the idea of losing any essential lumps was too frightening to contemplate again.
Put very briefly for now (as I plan to arrange the notes here soon, however insufferably long that may take), Charlotte and I are as strong as ever. I managed to pull off a First for both my modules last semester, making Orientation a success (albeit not as great a success as I thought it would be, but that is to the eventual benefit of its poems), and expect to achieve just as well this - after three years, I seem to have mastered the formula. Depending upon how well I write these final two assignments over this Easter break (it officially started this past Monday), I should graduate this July with the First-class degree I've been hoping for so desperately. Orientation proved difficult to conquer, with my suffering worse writer's block than usual in the middle period - it took the experience I accumulated over the cruise with my family and Charlotte at Christmas to sprint to the finish.
Now that I've overcome that unusually white winter, I have an even stranger spring and summer to deal with. Alongside those two assignments (an essay I'm planning on Jamesian metaphor and eight more poems for April 29th; the latter will be particularly awkward considering I've again run out of ideas!), my interaction with Jane has led to her offering me a job working for the Dean of Students’ Office taking lecture notes for other disabled students. Hopefully, it will allow me to stay in Norwich at least for the time being, whilst also saving up to study for an MA in Poetry or an NCTJ course; I’m already in the middle of organising a new house to live in come the autumn with Rob and David Astley, both of whom I have got to know better since I last mentioned them. That is my medium-term life plan. Moving back to Manchester now, back to my parents’ house, a much more static social life and a more difficult pursuit for my first job now that I suddenly need one would not be the right decision. Perhaps the most immediate event worthy of consideration is my twenty-first birthday in just over a week. My family and I have been planning a party at the Timbers hotel in Fincham since the end of last year; around forty people should be there.
It’s difficult to comprehend how quickly things have progressed from when I first started this journal nearly six years ago, when I was most definitely ‘thecomaboy’; while the moniker will always maintain some relevance to me, and particularly to that time, it isn’t quite as applicable now, particularly the final word. I think it’s been clear for a while that I’d like to improve the quality of what I produce in my blog, making updates regular again, my creative writing and criticism of art and sport expanded and more clearly distanced from the more emotional reflections I started with here... That won’t be done entirely, of course - I find art and life inextricably linked; the personal no doubt informs the creative and the critical - but I should maintain a professional focus; after all, writing is my preferred vocation, not just a hobby. thethumbcompass is still an empty station, having seen absolutely no action while I wrote Orientation. Perhaps that can be the new hub. I think I will catch up to the present and then make the move.
The walls between this journal, the next and even the one before are my own artificial boundaries in time, self-conscious attempts to mark a new era for my own comfort. When I do eventually pick up the compass, I won’t forget that life is ultimately a continuous flight, a movement through space that cannot be definitively bordered.
(Started in the early hours of Friday 26th March 2010. Finished at 1.35pm.)