Summer ends

This summer has dragged on and on, seemingly endlessly.  But tomorrow, at last, I am leaving to head back to school — my father and I are driving.  So we leave Monday, arrive probably Friday night or early Saturday.  I’m really looking forward to it.  But a short entry to catch up before I go back to packing.

The most useful thing I have done since the LifeCycle was that a few weeks ago I flew out to Syracuse to be with Brendan when Peter died.  That’s probably a very cold-blooded way of putting it, and being useful wasn’t exactly what I was thinking about at the time, but it was the effect, for me at least — I’ve been less depressed since then, or at least less consistently.  Don’t know exactly why.  Maybe the feeling that I am doing something worth the doing.  Unlike most of this summer.  Tap classes are good, being with Sam is good, leaving Sam is horrible.  Sam flew back to Canada in the middle of the night or early morning today…he and his roommate got back from Hawaii at around 11:00 last night, and I went out to say goodbye before he left for Canada.  It was a very casual conversation…the kind of visit that is filled with silences because you’re parting ways and what can you really say.  Chloe, his roommate, had a rough trip — she has some health problems, and apparently was hospitalized for several hours on their last day there.  Sam only mentioned this to me, I think, because he had intended to use that time to find a gift for me (and for his family), but he was in hospital with her instead.  My first reaction was slightly shocked, that he even felt the need to apologize for not bringing me anything back — it had never occured to me that he might.  And of course there is nothing, nothing to forgive.  But now, the next day, knowing that I don’t know when we’ll see each other again, I’m irrationally angry at Chloe for getting so dehydrated that Sam didn’t have time to bring me something.  I don’t have anything tangible of him.  I have a number of things that I have manufactured into being something of him, but all of them were my initiative.  One of them doesn’t even actually have anything to do with him…when he stayed with me last summer, I did a load of his laundry, and when I was folding it, I found a broken jade bracelet in with the clothes.  I tried to give it back to him, but he insisted it wasn’t his.  It probably belonged to Benjamin’s girlfriend at the time.  But since it was broken, Ben figured she wouldn’t want it, and let me keep it.  I hang it on my walls away from home.  And it wasn’t even his.  He could have brought me back the smallest, most trashy thing, and I would have loved it.  Because it would have been from him.  But Chloe got sick instead.

Beneath me, I know.  Sorry.

I just miss him so much already.

But when we do see each other again, we’ll have a lot more in common, experientially.  Because he’s going to drama school this year, finally.  So we’ll have a better understanding of where each other are coming from.  It will be good.  And of course being apart from him will stop hurting so much…it always does…eventually.  Fate just doesn’t allow us to be together at the moment.  I’d give the world.

Someday, he says, we will live and work in the same city.  I wonder if we’ll ever be roommates.  I kind of love that idea.

Anyway, Brendan is doing a lot better, and I’m really glad I went out there.  I think it was good that he had someone making sure he ate and slept and got out of the house every so often, that sort of thing.  And the last couple of times I’ve talked to him, he’s sounded much better.

I should get back to packing…maybe I can be done at a reasonable hour and get some sleep tonight.  I think I was up until 4:00 last night…I didn’t get back from Sam’s until after 2:00, and then it was a while before I could sleep.  I’m not particularly tired, though.  Maybe there’s just too much to do.

By the way, Who Wants to be a Superhero rocks my socks.  As does Travis from So You Think You Can Dance, whom I would marry if I could.  Hurrah for worthwhile television.

–Stephanie