uhhh...

Leaving for New Zealand in, oh, two and a half hours. How the hell did this happen? Not that I'm complaining.

the sun rising.

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late school boys and sour prenticesprentices apprentices,

Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,the king will ride James I, the king of England at the time of Donne’s writing, had a known passion for riding horses and hunting.

Call country ants to harvest offices,

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

- John Donne

in my ears and in my eyes.

I knew it was going to be hard to say goodbye to him, but how was I to know that finding out exactly how hard it would be would be harder than the impending doom brought on by imagining it?

In the park, I said I would miss him. It was perfect clarity bursting forth into the foggy afternoon.

cheezy blasters.

30 Rock completes my life. So what will I do when I get to New Zealand when I have no Liz Lemon to relate to?

seeing the waves.

If I could stop being sad for a while, well maybe then I'd be happy.

And if I were happy, maybe I'd walk out of your life with a swift goodbye, never to return again.

a color of the sky.

...Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky...

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

by Tony Hoagland

you lied and now i can't stop thinking.

Birthdays come and go. They pile up and you forget them. Sometimes you sleep right through them. They arrive and disappear, and each year, it feels the same. I remember thinking not even six months ago that I would never worry about getting old. But as I watch television and read books, I'm constantly reminded of time passing and the fact that I've accomplished so little that I've set out to accomplish. I hate birthdays because they remind you of that. When I get to the birthday where I can say I've finished grad school, live in a place I love, have a job that challenges me/own my own business, and am surrounded by people I love, maybe then it will be a cause for celebration. This year, it was a farewell birthday.

It's been a really tough year for me: I let go of a damaging, cyclical relationship that was going nowhere; I graduated college into the worst job market in decades; I had to let go of my independence and move home for a while; I said goodbye to many of my friends who graduated.

But it's also been a wonderful year for me: I took action and am going to New Zealand, I fell in love with myself and met someone new, I let go of resentments from past relationships, I met new friends, I got an internship at a pub house I love, I went out a lot and finally discovered Los Angeles on my own terms, I resolved disputes with my friends, I wrote a thesis, I presented a thesis, and so on.

Looking at the list, I see the good outweighs the bad. I know this is only because I let go of past hurts. I know that this is something I must do in the future. I refuse to sleep through my next birthday. Instead, I hope to celebrate the small triumphs of my year and hopefully some larger ones too. And I hope I can get over the fact that he hurt me and move on with my life so I can restore my faith in relationships once again. It always breaks down and builds back up again, and I've done it over and over. That's how I know it will be okay.

almost to my valediction.

I seem to have acquired a terrible case of writer's block in the last few weeks. Someone once told me that in order to get over this sort of affliction, you just have to work right on through it. I worked through it with a note; I worked through it with words on top of words.

I left a note on your pillow for the very last time. Writing it, tears fill my eyes. I imagine your eyes skimming my words, dry and dark, deep and understanding. Understanding, but something tells me they do not empathize, they do not get at the core of how I am feeling. I think I am alone in that way. I wonder at your strength as the tears dry where they were never truly started.

The sky has turned a dark gray. And as it gets darker, I imagine the morning sky embracing blackness and turning itself around into night. In the nighttime, I imagine your arms cradling me, putting me to sleep. I try to remember how I fell into bed the night before, if you held me at all. Nothing comes back but blackness. In the morning, you tried to tuck in all the covers around me, but I whimpered and the ceiling spun again. I closed my eyes and tried to take it back, my last night in your bedroom. Instead, you closed your door and said "sleep." I slept. For what felt like days, I tossed and turned on your mattress, battling back against a throbbing headache caused by the emptiness of your indented pillowcase. If there was anything conscious in my sadness of sleep, it was my awareness of the nothing you leave when you are gone.

I finally wake up enough to take a shower. I speak to your roommate for what is probably the last time, take a shower in your bathroom, leave hair in your drain, brush my teeth. I take a pen off of your desk (which used to be mine, and I miss terribly the way it used to sit in my luminous room beside the bed we first slept in and the nightstand where I kept my journal) and rip a piece of paper from your notebook.

I begin to write. At first it is slow. I write your name. I see myself here again in the month of June, with the heat already coming in through your open window at 9 AM. I see myself here in May, our bodies wet from the hot tub, my eyes wet with tears I could no longer hold back in the darkness. I see myself here in May, where we first began, wishing it were April again, so I could meet you all over again and we could go back to my apartment and drink wine while tracing our fingers along a map of the United States of America (several days later, I was re-tracing your steps to California, going back to Chicago, where you started). I see myself on your bed that morning in October. It is my birthday. My head is spinning and my hair is wet. My eyes haven't started filling with tears yet. I see you left me a bottle of water, and I put the pen to the paper and breathe.

It is hard to know where to begin, so I tell you I will miss you. I don't tell you that I already do. I don't tell you I can feel that you've already left in so many ways. I begin with memories of you and I, and I find that I can't stop writing. Your apartment is full of memories: early mornings, late mornings, salmon, waffles, breakfast burritos, late nights, early nights, wine, watching television, margaritas, swimming, surfing, kissing, cuddling, smoking, so much laughter, ice cream, running errands, eating dinner, slipping out of my jeans and into your bed that starts out so cold until you follow me and I feel your breath against my forehead and you kiss me and it leaves a warm, damp mark. I keep writing, and I can't stop, and, by the end, I am crying until I see your dry eyes in my head, and I get angry.

I feel like time has gotten away from us both. Somehow one night turned into seven months. We barely spoke of the future, and we never spoke of the past. Seven months, and I still know so little. I only know that you are stronger than I am. I only know that when you picked up that note, you didn't cry like I did when I wrote it. I wish my words had the power to translate all of the ways you meant something to me, but something tells me they don't. That is the curse of words: I can cry and write them, and you can smile and never understand a thing I say.

making sense of moving abroad.

My favorite places in the world I've been are:

Galway, Ireland
Killarney, Ireland
Youghall, Ireland
Half Moon Bay, California
Venice Beach, California
Puerto Vallarta, Mexico (down on the Marina or off on a deserted island)
Parque Guell, Barcelona, Spain
Chicago, Illinois
Savannah, Georgia
Eze Village, Southern France
Smokey Mountains, Tennessee
Sunderland, Northern England

Here's the theme: water. There's a large body of water in each of these places, and that's why I know New Zealand was a good pick. No place in New Zealand is further than seventy-five miles from the ocean. Italy may be next. Mostly because it makes sense geographically.

say what now?

One week until my birthday, three weeks until New Zealand. My internship ended yesterday, and I don't remember how to have free time.

My final days in America look like this:
This weekend: Santa Cruz
Next week: packing, tying up loose ends
Next weekend: my birthday, friends from LA visiting
Two weeks from now: Go to LA, finish getting ready
Two weekends from now: Treasure Island Music Festival
Three weeks from now: New Zealand