I think we're gonna make it...

Returning to the scene of the crime is always the hardest part of memory mapping. It's so easy to forget how much smells, sights, even the taste of a certain drink can effect us. When we are away from everything we're safe.

Driving down the roads at home, thousands of miles away from here, there are things I would avoid. Things became unacceptable in that life,certain songs, letting people smoke in my car; I preferred coffee houses to bars, and would hide myself away in the book stores until near midnight.

But I made the choice to return, and failed to prepare for the onslaught of flashes, little moments that I had forgotten, but was then reminded of because of the details in this setting. It's so easy to become haunted by those things, to possibly become the shadow of who I was.

Changes have to be made, are being made. I do not want the same things anymore. I'm finding I long for things I never knew I wanted, or maybe I did. Maybe forgetting I wanted those was easier. But then again this longing is easier, easier than becoming possessed with want of the old things. It is easier to become real, than to remain a ghost.

How you remember things...

"If I turn back the pages of time I'd rewrite your point of view."

Are you ready?

The Difference

I keep telling a person the same story. The same incident, the moment when it changed. There are so many other moments that were worse, because then I think you knew, and continued not caring. Just acting, hurting with a purpose, maybe. But the innocent one (or maybe not so innocent), the first the one that tainted the rest of the year is what I tell. So I must ask myself why do I chose that one? I think it's less about you and more about her. She is lesser than me, I need to feel it, to know it. Even if your choice makes no sense, I want others to choose me...to have chosen me. Her one act of stupidity may outshine her accomplishments, some that even I admire. At the end of the day she and I are discarded, both children when it happened. I tell the story, to take that moment away from you...to regain control.

I worry I am becoming like you, shutting people out. They don't belong--fair enough. But I maintained the chatter for months, took time to know what I might be getting into. I communicate in other ways, still.

"I'm looking for a dare to be great situation."

I wonder if I have been ruined by 80's teen films. You know...."Say Anything", "Pretty in Pink", "Sixteen Candles", "Valley Girl", and pretty much anything starring the Brat Pack. (I'll leave my love for late 90's teen flicks out of this post). Do their happy endings, opposite side of the tracks-love stories keep me coming back for more? Have these become so engrained in me that I eventually see myself as an Andie, Samantha or Diane Court of various situations?

In Lindsey Alley's blog, she writes how a friend of her says life is an extention of high school, I wonder if this is true. Most of the time I hope it's not, and I hope Marc Blucas's character in "The Jane Austen's Book Club" was right, "high school was over a long time ago." At my last university I can say that for the most part this is true, but that was a fucking huge school. Here, I'm not so sure. Even last time during my "brief" stay, I felt the high school-ish undercurrents. One of my former flatmates was desperate to be seen as popular, even though she always said, "it didn't matter."

In a recent conversation with a friend, she said that any romantic entanglement with the boy I was into last time or his friend that I later realized I was into, would have been complicated due to the fact that we swam in different social circles. I agree with her observation more with the latter male than I do with with the former (since his social awkwardness may have balanced things out).

I have never been popular, and I learned at an early age that I was never going to be popular. I also learned that I wasn't completely ready to sell my soul and kill whatever made me, Me, in order to hangout with the football players and the cheerleaders. But this hasn't stopped me from liking "popular" boys. However, while these boys are indeed "popular," there tends to be something that suggests they don't really belong or that they wouldn't mind dating someone outside their scene. Perhaps that is why I tend to "fall" for those types, the ones who seem to have some depth. Blane fell for Andie; Jake Ryan chose Samantha, and Lloyd Dobler picked Diane Court. The girls were outsiders, the boys popular and yet they worked. The boys I chose were unwilling to cross that line.

My dear friend Dee would tell me to just "fuck it," and that I need to find someone worthy of me. She says I need to stop wondering if I'm good enough for "them". I know she is right, but I still can't stop wondering what role John Hughes has played in my way of thinking.

Twists

So I've only heard two people say this: "you always meet twice in a lifetime." For sometime I've been wondering if it was just a bullshit line. Granted the evidence with most people in my life (such as some of my best friends) would suggest that the saying is indeed true.

Three years ago I took a poetry workshop at the University I am now at. I was doing study abroad, and met a girl who was on a semester abroad. She wrote this amazing poem, that I eventually copied into my diary so I could just read it over and over again. Everytime I looked at it I'd wish that I had written it. I never got to tell her how wonderful it was. That is, until tonight. At the last minute I decide to attend a reading with some of my classmates. We were gabbing when I saw her walk in. Initially I thought it couldn't be her, but then I decided to go up and see if it was.

I went up asked if her name was G and she said it was. Turns out she did her MA here last fall, and is trying to stick around. I started talking about her poem. I told her she needed to send it out, that poem needs to be published. I was gushing like a fan girl. But, I was happy I finally got to say what I had wanted to all these years.

So maybe you do get to tell people what you need to, even when you don't think you'll get the chance.

Desperately Wanting

I sometimes wonder if we get so lazy in wanting something, that we get used to wanting that one particular thing that we hold on even when we don't want it anymore. Maybe we held onto it for years because it was easier than picking up something else, than starting something new.

I am a creature of habit, I don't like change, well no major changes that I don't choose to make (and I either have to jump into those or really think about them). I also have a hard time of letting go of things as evidenced by the boxes of stuff I have from high school in my room at home. (I need my freshman year planner, why?). I hold onto people, friends who I'm not really close to but we're so used to talking that eventually we're rerunning our convos, nothing new--everything's the same. My lost loves, did I ever let them go? Maybe, but how long did it take before I pried my hands from the hope that they would one day turn back and say "I want you too;" I've lost count. I wanted to be right about them. I don't like being wrong. In all these ways I'm stubborn.

I think about the last boy, and I wonder if maybe I stopped caring even before I left. If maybe, it was easier than admitting I wanted someone else who seemed farther out of reach than he was. There were cracks in things later that year, and the sweet moments no longer belong to him. It's not his voice I recall now, even though I heard it more than his friend's. Maybe my stubborness kept me blind.

I've always loved this quote

"Do you know when they say soulmates? Everybody uses it in personal ads. "Soul mate wanted." It doesn't mean too much now. But soulmates- think about it. When your soul- whatever that is anyway- something so alive when you make music or love and so mysteriously hidden most of the rest of the time, so colorful and big but without color or shape- when your soul finds another soul it can recognize even before the rest of you knows about it. The rest of you just feels sweaty and jumpy at first. And your souls get married without even meaning to- even if you can't be together for some reason in real life, your souls just go ahead and make the wedding plans. A soul's wedding must be too beautiful to even look at. It must be blinding. It must be like all the weddings in the world- gondolas with canopies of doves, champagne glasses shattering, wings of veils, drums beating, flutes and trumpets, showers of roses. And after that happens you know- that's it. This is it."- Missing Angel Juan