and sometimes my mind races so fast from fragment to fragment, like i can feel each synapse. i had another momentary meditation of mortality while watching the green mile this evening. its the kind of movie that makes you feel small and inconsequential and incomplete without passion that serves as a catalyst for revelation and change across a nation, the kind of movie that makes you question morality and mortality - the kind of movie that leaves me clinging to the hope that someday i'll be published and perhaps read widely and tucked away on a shelf in a couple of libraries only to realize a few seconds later that even that isn't permanent enough to make me feel okay with the fact that we all die some day, the kind of movie that makes you want to grab the people that matter most to you and run, fast and far away, to a time and place where you can exhaust yourself of everything that makes you happy because there's so little sense in the things we force ourselves to do in the end. i want so badly to be so much more than average, to live a shocking life, yet a settled one. i'm terrified of getting older, & absolutely cannot stand hospitals. is it a common indication of youth that you can't imagine yourself with wrinkles and gray hair and so many years of life already behind you?

or is it just some morbid aspect of me that honestly believes i won't live that long? in high school i got scolded when i said i couldnt imagine living past forty (and what about children, but the thought that someone could be born someday that regards me with the same mixture of simulataneous need & exasperation that i feel for my parents just baffles me. but sometimes just the sheer luck of being born, as counterintuitive as a concept like that might sound, is overwhelming and itself enough to counter deaths inevitability. and the reason i gave up on philosophy after a semester is because i'm not going anywhere with any of this). it's just sometimes if i let my breathing slow down and try to imagine what it would be like to feel absolutely stress free, it's almost as if there's not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. but then i'll hear a chord or see a smile or remember a time, and the fact that we only get one shot at all this seems a gross overestimation of our innate ability to live. i want more practice. i could never get tired of these same sensations, of falling in love or going for a run or losing yourself entirely in a book or moving picture show. and i could think for hours about problems with too many variables and no solutions.

and i could lament forever about the hurt that comes with all that we never get to experience. and life comes down to how something can be too much without ever being enough, how the impractical can become necessary, how missing you feels like an inevitable reflex to some complicated equation of time plus distance multiplied by some constant. how opposites aren't always mutually exclusive, how you can be grateful for loss because it means you actually had something, how daydreaming tomorrow fifty million different ways still doesn't make a single one of them any more likely, how things happen to you that you never would have predicted a couple years ago, yet you can't fathom how your life would be without them, how people can be everything to you and then nothing, even those you swore you wouldn't be able to ever go on without. the need and desire to correspond to practicality, and how when it resists, you attribute it to being something worth the inconvienence, and that alone can create something worth almost anything, how i never run out of words to write in reaction to the same daily thoughts and feelings, how each new phrase renders these distinct (as if there were ways to pronounce hope and hurt without an emphasis on different syllables). and tonight has been restless.

too much sugar pulsing through my bloodstream, endless cups of hot chocolate and peppermint schnapps at the christmas party. my legs feel like jello, my joints ache, it's not much different from how i've felt every day this week except i can't really think straight. we'll put off the studying for another half day, we'll lounge around and aimlessly watch the first season of the oc trying to see if i can find anything redeeming in its unrealistic extravagance. i think back to when i started drinking, the mistakes i made in altered states, the depedence on a martini to spice things up, to facillitate drama when rural suburbian boredom threatened to stifle that feeling of living so immediately, instantaneously, in relying on always changing situations to give me new things to think about and feel. and that's what high school was for me, a fit comfortable enough to pick and twist and pull and bend and marvel, but even when it tore a bit never did it break. and i miss that aspect, the tight-knit i'll promise my definition of forever to you in a heartbeat, the unconditional friendship forged from consistency and shared first experiences. and i don't want to lose touch and i don't want to let go because home still makes up the majority of my best memories.

home still encompasses most of the moments and milestones, still incoporates the people that mean that most to me. and college has been largely a faded screen print of those yesterdays. i can go out and smile and laugh and look like i'm enjoying myself to anyone that sees the pictures the next day. i can drink and get so happy that it doesn't even feel like i'm faking it. but then reality just feels more alarming, more empty, more unfortunate and ultimately much too disappointing. and it's because when i wake up there's nothing left of that feeling of living in each glorious moment, there's just a couple of contrasty pictures on my digital camera and clothing from last night layed out all over my floor. there's a million faces i am so happy to see floating through my dreams, but only one i'd like to roll over and find lying next to me. on breaks, during summer, i used to love waking up. i love living rooms with every couch filled, i love breakfasts in coffee shops and diners. the morning after my sisters birthday party was perfect, the july heat, waking up tangled in sheets, and the way my room began to fill with people i love more than anything.

my mother's cooking slowly rising up the stairs, people slowly filtering out but some stayed and the way we sunbathed in the backyard on the hammock and swam in my neighbors pool as the sun saturated our skin, the way we napped midday [but not really because little cousins playing & screeching in the background are noisy], and the shared nature of everything. and i've been feeling disillusioned with distance lately. i know i want this relationship, something that despite all the foreshadowing still surprises me. because i've spent the past three years running because i can't do things halfway, because being a girlfriend probably means too much to me because of my history. i don't understand relationships measured in weeks; i hesitate, scrutinize, consider before i commit because commitment is something, something much more complicated than perhaps it should be, for me. and i had to be careful with this, because i can't let myself feel resentment for things beyond both our control. i have to watch my expectations. just because they were consistently exceeded at the beginning doesn't mean that a trend like that can continue endlessly. missing manifests itself in different ways. when you miss something uncertain there's more overt grasping.

you are continually needing reassurance, and i guess the fact that i still want it is just something i need to settle with myself. because when you miss something tangible, something that you want daily, sometimes it's easiest to just disengage and keep busy. i've done it, i do it, i plan to continue until this entire year fades away, but i do not like it. i wish there was more that i looked foward to, more motivation that stemmed from something other than restlessness and a desire to inch towards perfection. i don't like the slack in my cheeks as i sit here and type this, i don't like the small crease inbetween my eyebrows that hints at my dissatistfaction or perhaps my slight dehydration headache. but days like this are so prone to self loathing, i procrastinate my endorphin love and feel more worthless with each lazy moment. i used to think hangovers were a kind of poetic justice, but even on a great night here, the next day always feels unjustified. it's just not the same without slowly waking up to sympathetic faces (or just the one you can't wait to fall back asleep with after a greasy breakfast). it's not the same without the familiar drive along country roads and the treehouse that was our second home & early morning runs around the little pavement track. it's just not the same as it used to be, and sometimes i really wish i had a time machine.