Been a long time, baby.

It's been a long time in every sense of that word.  I've been writing, though. In notebooks instead of on a computer.  In notebooks, on real paper, my handwriting fills up the space differently than it does on a browser and I like that.  I also like that I can write before I go to bed under the soft light of an ancient snake lamp that happened to be in the room to which I've been relegated.

Friends have graduated from college. Friends that aren't that much older than me. Damn. I guess I don't have much to say about it other than that I can't imagine going back to school without all these people.  I'll still be happy to go already.

I feel so different at home than I do at school.  At school I'm more confident and I have some sort of future. I swagger. I wear sunglasses when I go outside to make sure I don't have to worry about recognizing people. I wear whatever I want and I don't worry that my hair sticks up in the morning. Here I'm a different kind of person because I have a past here. I'm the less athletic, the more artsy, the sweet Gretel, even if I'm a little odd, I'm the epitomized girl-next-door. 

And I hate it.

Now with 50% less metal

In February of last year, I got a microdermal piercing on my sternum. I loved it. Body modification, for me, is kind of a way that I can control my body. I've written about the war I've waged on my body since I went through puberty and for some reason, controlling the way my body looked by sticking some metal into it really helped. I would look down and there would be this little piece of metal, peeking at me from between my breasts, which were already contentious to me. Were they too big, too small? Do the pock marks from the heat rash I get every summer ruin them? But there was this little piece of titanium that made them beautiful accessories.

It made me a little more confident. People I didn't even known would stop and ask me what that was on my chest, and, no matter what the reaction was, I still loved it.
It started to reject over summer break when I was pulling on my swimsuits every morning, then layering a PDF over it for teaching canoeing. By the time I got back to school it was ok, but a little pronounced and over the past 6 months, it has turned purple with scar tissue as my body pushed the little metal feet up to the top layers of skin. It needed to go. I'm working at the same camp this summer, doing the same thing, and I can't imagine what it would be like to have it reject while I'm basically living in a glorified lean-to on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan.

It's been through a lot with me. A mental illness, my last horrible relationship, many hook-ups and a summer back at camp. It's been through coming-out and fights but it has always been there, maybe even lymphing for a day or two or pressing into my sternum when I gave a particularly tight hug to remind me that it was still there.

And now it's not and all I have is a little purple scar and a weird brown scab to remind me of my titanium friend. I guess now carrying my bags across my chest won't be as painful or dangerous and I won't have to explain why I have metal sticking out of my chest. I'll just have to make up a story for how I got this scar.

I am not doing my work so instead I did this

I <3 you, Zack.

Looking forward

About this time in the semester i get existential.
What do I have to look forward to? More school. Always. More school. More papers that I don't want to write, that will get read once and discarded. More stress and stomachaches and tears. More feelings of the deepest inadequacy. And then I slog home for the summer or for winter break and I drag myself back here to do it again.
I guess now I can see the end of the tunnel to break the cycle. One more year. 365 days from now I will be finishing up my last papers and graduating. I know I can do it, graduating from college is no big feat.
But I do get sick of having nothing but small things to keep me afloat. A dinner out at a chinese restaurant, an afternoon of beer and gossip with some friends is all I hold onto. Summer is desolate, and then back to school, where I will have to deal with the fact that all of my friends have graduated and I'm alone.
And thinking about the future brings an insane amount of anxiety. I'll be a real person one day I guess, with bills to pay and a job (hopefully) to go to. I'll have real furniture that is mine and might not even be made in a prison. I'll have a real girlfriend and a kitchen where we can make breakfast burritos the next morning. I will have friends too, but I want to still talk to the ones I have now because I have finally fallen where I am supposed to be.
In my real life, as opposed to the life I've been living for the past 20 years, my refrigerator will always have a beer or two for company, my cupboards always some kind of exciting cookies and a wooden chest of teas. In my real life, my apartment will be fashionably cluttered with the remnants of this other life which I have lived: pictures from summer camp, posters, mismatched plates, mugs, cups, utensils, furniture, appliances and an ever-present animal. I will always have an afghan to drape around me while I work, I will always have the heat a little too low in the wintertime so that I can snuggle myself under blankets at night. I will have too many books, or perhaps just the right number, because I do not believe that bookshelves should be used for anything but books.
I will live in an old apartment building that has its peculiarities, and I will like them. The third stair might squeak and the front door might stick in the summer heat, but it all just makes the experience of living there one I will remember. I will have a sunroom where I keep my plants, where my dog will like to sleep and where I will sleep in the summer so that I can get up with the sun.
In reality, in one year I will probably be in the same boat that I am in now where my life is nothing more than a few hundred words on a silly blog.