going away to college

August 24, 2006

I moved into my dorm at New Paltz today, and things look promising. I went to a ΚΣ party. I feel comfortable at parties, surrounded by the smell of beer and sweat in crowded rooms. I feel together and alive, yet apart from the world outside. On the ride up I was thinking how I want to be a famous writer and how it would be if future English nerds tried to get my dorm room like how at Smith girls want to be in Sylvia Plath’s.

It’s crazy to think that I am really here. And that Pierce and Lisa are, too! I’ll only be here four years, and in that time I’ll have had four rooms. Imagine how many people have called each of those spaces home. I think this lends itself to poetry. I know so much will happen in the short amount of time I live between these asbestos laden walls (there really is a sticker, half peeled off the wall, warning about possible exposure to asbestos and the entire time I was moving in I could only hope that Jocie wouldn’t see it because she worries about me but also because she went to Brandeis and I don’t think it’s a concern there).

October 11, 2006

Phrases to consider using for public art project: Pin-Up Girl of the Universe, I wish I’d kept a scrapbook, This is art.

Someday when I have a daughter, I think I’ll name her Page because it’s what you turn to find out what happens next, the reader’s most physical connection with books.

I love Pierce, and when we break up (which is slowly happening) I will never think of him as a period but as a dash which started the subsequent phrase.


November 25, 2006

My date with Chris went better than most, I think. We ate Indian food and drank a bottle of good wine, not the kind you get in a box or get served at a wedding. I am not now, nor will I ever, be in love with him, but I will go out with him again and will probably even sleep with him. It is difficult to imagine that because I am still mourning Pierce. He is the most genuine and gentle soul I have ever known, but in truth I am not gentle, and these things alone do not make someone a good boyfriend for you.
Notes: a play, good Christian wife, child dies, she doubts God, leaves husband “All my life I’ve waited for something that may never come. One of the things that I did wait for just got taken away, by a car, which is just a bunch of metal and glass. Isn’t it absurd? A child is an organism of breath and cells, and, and dendrites. Please understand, Howard. All my life I’ve been waiting, and waiting is lonely. I’m not waiting anymore, so I no longer need someone to wait with.” Very Ibsen-esque.
For some reason I feel compelled to tell mom about all this, how I am overwhelmed with grief and joy all at once & how I want to embrace it, like throwing myself into the waves that first day back on the beach every summer, but I know she would not understand in the way I’d like. Mostly I want her to know I’m doing fine.
January 21, 2007

Pierce and I broke up for forever this time. All this last while I have also been seeing Mike, which is ironic because he gave me this journal as a going away gift when I went away to school, and now I’m with him and ending the journal and possibly even coming home next semester, as if he gave me the paper to write the story. I can’t believe I thought people at college would care more about the world. It’s good to give up illusions. Somehow this is a fitting end to this journal, and I don’t know that I’ve ever had a fitting ending before. It’s not a completely happy end, but it’s not a sad ending, either. It’s not much of an ending at all, which I suppose is the point since I have a new journal to begin, and all one’s journals seem to be on a continuum.