black chevrolet

You might like the gypsy life
You judge your progress by the phases of the moon
Get your compass and your sharpest knife
People love you when they know you're leaving soon ...

- John Gorka

I have nothing to say, really. My thoughts run in circles and I watch them run, lazily, knowing that they don't really matter...like children before they grow up...

The graduates that I used to know, who helped me through a rough childhood and mentored my struggles, are here for a visit. I look into their faces and try to see who they used to be, I remember the good times I had with them, the good times that are irrevocably part of my past and whose import I have not yet realized.

I smile and hug them and say hello how are you and listen patiently as they tell me. About their jobs, their homes, their wives or husbands and their lives.

And they look at me curiously, wondering who I am. And we both know that we may as well be strangers now, for what we shared then we share no longer. It's back there in the rearview mirror, a pleasant memory, but no more than that...I am sad, somehow, sad that the feelings I felt about them then can never come back. I'm standing on my own two feet now, I'm independent, and I have my own life in my own two clumsy hands. I now realize what my dad meant when he said not to worry about making friends in college, because I would never keep in touch anyway. There would be no reason to.

I have failed them, those "seniors", those friendly people who took me under their wing, an awkwardly old and ignorantly wise freshman. I have not passed on the gift of friendship they have given me, I have betrayed their kindness. I have not passed on the tradition of caring tacitly intended to be handed down from one class to the next. I did not have it in me. I did not have the moral strength to extend the same welcoming hand to my younger brothers and sisters. And I am ashamed, but unrepentant, for I cannot be other than who or what I am.

"changing it rests" as the fire and love and strife dude used to say, what was his name - Heraclitus? Heraclitus knew how to put it. The sand dunes blow into each other, shift and slide, but the desert stays the same, always changing and forever the same.

(wow. This was a long post, for a bitchy one.)

(Oh, and vacations really suck. I hate vacations. I intend to avoid vacations in the future. I simply don't know what to do with myself. Half of my two life activities, reading and working, are gone. It's awful!)