is this the city of angels or demons?

Painted walls around me and it's the best way to live. Nothing like the cement blocks stacked around us back at college. And everything here is mine. Not like the things back at college that so many hands have already touched and claimed for their own. When you're home and walking down a dirt path with a great friend, not sure where you are or where you're going, tall crazy grasses piled up around you so you can't see - that's when you realize that manicured grass and groomed trees and brick pathways aren't enough. You realize it isn't enough to be surrounded by people you don't know, to get lost in a crowd, to be surrounded by man-made nature. There was about a week there when I thought it was enough. Now that I'm home, I know why that feeling faded.

I'm home and every flaw of the furniture, groan of the floor, hiss of the air conditioning is familiar. The fat blue cushions of my chair, the small soft body lying on my bed with her huge eyes and her underbite pointed in my direction as I type, the quiet calm of the neighborhood outside my window is all familiar.

It's hard enough to be here, in comfort and quiet solitude, without the person you love. I don't know how I'll do it when I get back to the crush and crowd of school. How I'll do it when all I've got to look at are cement walls and used furniture. Remembering the way we lay with only the rose colored light from my pig lamp, the way we turned the air down as cold as we could just so we could wrap ourselves in each other and blankets - I don't know how I can stand to go back. It's hard enough to remember it when I'm here.

All the pain of it is twisted until I can hardly tell the good from the bad. Which feelings are stronger - the walk through the arboretum, the concrete bench under the tree, the hours spend just lying in my bed; or the simple fact that those things won't happen again for god knows how long?

It's all mixed up into something crazy that I can't define. But the simple fact is that life is a twisted mix of good and bad and they aren't separable all the time. Maybe they aren't ever separable. So I'll take my bad with my good. I don't know how I'll stand to go back, but I've got all the memories of the good to push me through.

There is all of this good and bad feeling twisted up inside of me right now. Unlike a few days ago, there is also all this hope. All this hope soaking into the good and bad together, loosening them out of the hard knots they form inside me.

I guess a relationship is only long distance if the feelings start to fade. Because you are with me right now. I know that much. I know it.

posted by Anonymous @ 10:23 AM