Summer is an inherently nostalgic time of year. Even the radio stations recognize this, and they milk it, playing songs that throw back to one, two, even three or four summers ago. So it's fucking painful sometimes, because I've had some of the most beautiful and blissful summers, the last four of them I'd say. I remember jamming in the car on endless summer afternoons with Raiyan, after pretending to work in the Biology lab for a few hours each day. It's a more poignant and visceral pull for me right now, because I'm back in the same old place, walking the same old halls, drinking the same old coffee. I'm loving and imbibing the Biology aspect of the experience so much more than I did four summers ago. This has been a great healing and growing and learning experience for me, on so many levels that I could not begin to regret my decision to be here in the slightest. I've rediscovered how to live and love in comfort with my roommates. I've rediscovered my passion for learning and meeting new people.
But it does pull me back, sometimes. And I mean, for all the sweet-scented memories that come flooding back with those throwback songs, there are others that hurt like a bitch, to put it eloquently. Like when I hear 'Yellow' by Coldplay, I always do (and maybe always will) be yanked back to that time, last semester, when Gordon drove me back in a zip car to the Rhode Island T.F. Green airport, and we listened to that song together in this kind of heavy, sad, silence, where every lyric pierced and bled, but our souls fused together in the damp air in this kind of crazy beautiful fucked up thing we like to call 'love'.
So I look at my other friends who have had experiences that they have truly, deeply had to heal from; like, not little stutters in the road like those that have befallen Annie or Mimi from time to time, but like real horse shit, like Molly, Tori, and Maddie have had to haul their asses out of for the last few years, at least. And I'm inspired, because there are success stories in the making, beautiful journeys and paths that they have carved out for themselves. But sometimes a success story on the surface is really cratered and unstable, upon a little deeper searching. Like, in what universe is a healthy life one that relies on aderol and heavy-duty iron supplements to function through the entirety of a day? In what world is hookah and alcohol a reasonable diet for sustaining a human being? And why is it so easy to fall into the rut of psychiatric medication? Where a bad week or a month demands an upped dose of anti-depressant, isn't addiction something of a worry? It is the first thing that occurs to me. I want to be able to get high off of life, off beauty and friends and love. Sometimes it's a godawful pain trying to find actual means of doing so, but I think it can be done. Especially if I can throw myself with childlike detachment into my pursuits; that is where the key lies, I think. Because otherwise, every experience is plagued by the paradox of hedonism.
I'm sitting here, and I'm waiting for Dave to text me back. I know I probably shouldn't have sent the second one, but he didn't answer to my first one after a night and a day. I'm sick of feeling like this. I thought it was over when I was younger, messing around with asshole boys before I started dating G and stopped having to bite at little juicy nibblets of text messages or stray thoughts flung my way by boys who were, let's face it, way less into me than I was into them.
I'm worried that I'm beginning to be part of Dave's sick compartmentalization.
Compartmentalization, from my expert knowledge after leading a successful double life for 20 years, is the only way to sustain such an existence. Teetering on the brink of two worlds, it is hard to mix them and remain fully engaged in one or another. I think I may be slowly discovering that the only way around this is to create and embrace your own sort of dual existence, or to forge a slow and painful reconciliation process. Honesty is important, but I'm not sure that I mean for moral reasons, because I think that is a contrived and easy explanation that people fall back on when they don't feel like thinking too hard. I think honesty with others, and with ourselves, is the way that we stave away a painful case of cognitive dissonance. That, and an apple a day. Or maybe a TV show and a dirty mag.
The Valley of Goblins was a quiet, desolate place, taken straight from another world aeons and miles away. A desolate desert wind stirred every atavism left inside, from my loins to that burning place beneath the heart where passion hides. There was that quiet loneliness, that strange artistry of God's hand and imagination meshing in every rounded, smoothed lump, grainy to the touch and perfectly molded to the curve of a human hand.
The valley wasn't as crowded as I'd pictured it in my mind. Apparently, it takes a few of my favorite 'mental pictures' stitched together to form something reasonably close to reality. Because now, I think I've got a pretty good grasp on it. It's like God's playground for adults. You get there, and you just want to climb all of the things! And you want to run everywhere! And you see shapes and faces and you clamber and you slide, and when it rains and everything turns to soft red clay, you take your shoes off and you smush around. And no-one gives a damn how old they are or you are, you just have to stage a little photo shoot against any goblin that remotely resembles anything that you've ever vaguely caught a glimpse of in pop culture before.
A pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.
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