Digging and filling up holes
Posted Sunday, October 29, 2006 @ 11:07 PM
Lately when I come here, it is because I have turned over some new stone in thinking about myself in relation to my new environment. Sometimes it is because the stone I feel I need to turn over is much too large to lift all at once, and so after some failed attempts at hoisting it away from the earth with my tiny arms, I come here to figure out what I can do better.
Some days I feel like I know a hundred people. We pile into cars and drive the short distance to the movie theater. We compare the amount of school work we have not done, though nothing shall ever compare to ASFA in that sense. Some days I see almost everyone I know as I walk to class or grab a meal at the cafeteria. I juggle lunch dates and movie nights and activities on campus until it's late, when I saunter back to my room to pretend to study. I fall asleep on my books.
Other days I feel like something is broken. Like I haven't been properly synchronized with the universe. I pass no one. I eat alone while staring out the window at cars passing. I check my P.O. box more than can be considered reasonable. My cell phone is vacant, as if its ring tone has fallen out. Sometimes I spend entire days waiting, walking aimlessly around campus hoping to run into someone I know, hoping someone will remember that I exist and call me. I call people who don't answer. No one answers. Or they are busy. Or they say they will call me back and don't. Some days I nap from post-lunch until dark, or I stare at the ceiling, feeling lost.
There are days when I feel I am building something great, and nights when I feel acutely alone.
It's nights like these that I get caught between my own sentences, reading through passages that still live here, but are gone in the sense that this is the only way I can revisit them. I will never be who I was in the spring, or early last year, just as I have not been the little girl climbing my neighbors' trees since they moved away and we grew older.
I suppose the trouble comes with finding that person again in this new context—finding a Glynnis-shaped hole and trying to fill it.
Welcome to the past, bucko. You're swimming through the archive of rocket-fish.org. If this isn't where you were headed, I suggest you get out of here while there's still time.
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Here's something to read during one of those 'acutely lonely' times, if you like. It is a journal entry I wrote a few years ago while feeling somewhat similar.
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2 February 2004
CCBC Murrieta, Cafeteria
6:45am—eating breakfast.
“It’s a terrible argument with no resolution,” is how I begin this fourth and final semester of college. What was expected to be a glad reunion with old friends has become a daily struggle, oscillating between severe loneliness and the earnest desire to be content in Christ alone.
Somehow I've garnered a type of publicity on campus. Whether because of my status on Yearbook or the legends surrounding my six-month journey into Australia, I’ve become a minor celebrity. I try to ignore it. When class is dismissed, I gather my things and leave. Others talk. I say nothing until I am hailed by a stranger.
“Hi, Mike Spotts!”
Does my name have any real meaning to him, or is it a two-syllable sound he chimes simply because everyone else does? Perhaps I am so different, that when I meet people I cannot help but imagine the events and traits their names may represent. Today I met a woman, Tiffany, and I wondered what lifelong details lay hidden inside the seven letters that symbolize her life.
So far everyone only talks about scores, plans for the day, funny stories. Rarely do the “private” topics surface. Where are the brave ones who walk the ropes of fragile honesty?
This dissatisfaction with shallow friendships stems from the abundance of amazing relationships developed while I was abroad. I long to regain the delicate openness that I shared, but I have yet to connect with anyone here on a similar level of transparency.
Honest friendships are not established in a single night over conversations about movies or campus regalia. Like exquisite linen, true friendships are woven from the threads of a hundred most colorful days, embroidered by the stitches of a thousand finely detailed memories. Spinning this kind of material takes time so for now I stand socially and emotionally naked.
I am not the one they knew nine months ago, the one who thrived on repetitive stimulation, hollow conversations and superficiality. I throb with a sadness that draws tears. My adolescent craving to be known has been replaced with a longing to know someone else, anyone I may love for more than a single season.
I want transparency more than anything else in the world.
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Fortunately, six months later was the beginning of the best friendships I've ever had; I found places where I fit tightly. I'll pray that you find your transparent places, too.
-Mike: .
www.theopenlife.com
31 Oct 2006, 1:45 AM.