unconnected

Today I woke up feeling not quite put together, and after a string of minor incidents I pretty much went to pieces. Not in a bad or depressing way, not in a completely liberating way either. In the Adams bathroom before my mock interview I thought, how little and how much people know of each other. There's so much feeling between people that goes unsaid. There's so much I see of people that I wish I could let them know that I see. At the same time I know there's much more. I thought about other people's thoughts. And I thought, how many thoughts like these do people have while standing around, washing their hands in a public restroom, checking their mail, walking to class? Probably an endless amount. How much do I miss?

Then I had my mock medical school interview, and it hit me that I am going to be a doctor someday. Where I'll be doesn't matter very much when I think about it in those terms. Very, very soon I'm not going to be a college student anymore. I feel so small. We grow to fit the expanse of our environment, and then we move to places much bigger. Sometimes I would like to crawl back into the smallest space I can remember, when my world was the four walls of my teeny bedroom. When I could fit all my favorite trinkets on a little plastic yellow chair and point to that spot as everything I had. As a kid my room was a complete mess, but everything on that chair was carefully ordered. Sigh sigh sigh.

After my interview, I went to our last ASK reflection session and I was given a piece of paper that told me I made life lovely and a little pot of burnt orange roses and my little self distinctly crumbled at that moment. My mind spun and spun, thinking about the people here and how they give me such clear, strong images of how I would like to be. Such lighthearted fun while the weight of what they give was pulling me inside. So many feelings at once, I've been trying to fit everything together, but there's no order, none whatsoever. Growing up happens in so many directions.

I came back to my room, chose a playlist and started writing in my personal journal. I haven't written much in the past couple of months. Not just because I was busy, but because I was trying to get outside of myself, to share the things I'd normally hole up in there with other people. But I think I miss myself, I miss that relationship. I realized that ultimately, that's who I will always return to, and I don't want to abandon that. I also realized that another reason it's been hard is because I have no idea what's going on with me. Everything's so disconnected, and I have no concrete words for how I feel. I wanted to write and write until I had nothing left to say, but I flipped the pages and found that I had only a few pages left. It wouldn't feel right to start a new one until after I leave Boston, so I saved them.

I did start a list of what I would like. Just anything. Things I'd like to do, have, see. In the process of doing that I started crying and I went on crying for a good twenty minutes as my playlist drifted through Rachael Yamagata, Joni Mitchell, Oasis, Iron & Wine, the Chili Peppers, Coldplay. All these sounds that have become such a part of me. I wasn't sad, I'm not sad. It was just a too-much-feeling cry, and I'm sitting right in front of my window and in front of the sky that will not stop raining after days and days of gray, and I thought of what Jackie said about crying with the world, and I felt like it was all right.

This song by Heather Nova is about how all that's left of a beautiful night fits into a paper cup. How nice that would be. It reminds me of that moment in Garden State when she catches his single tear in a paper cup. Yes, it might be nice to be contained. But spilling over is what we do.