Transient, Like Me

So I left my jersey in Mare’s car. Purely accidental, or subconsciously purposeful? Who can tell. Either way, I’m dropping by her house tomorrow after my art class to pick it up. And did I imagine it, or did she seem pretty happy about this?

I haven’t even told you about my art class, have I? I’ve been so neglectful of my diary lately. Tomorrow will be my fourth class. It’s an amazing class. It’s so far been all about the technicalities and intricacies of mixing paints and producing specific colours. Something which, as it turns out, I excell at.

I don’t excell at many things. I know I talk myself up a bit here, but the last time I was ever told I had a gift was in the last year of high school when my English teacher read my essays.

My tutor is wonderfully passionate, in a way which is simultaneously freakish and infectious. He just about dances with joy when someone does something right, and when I mixed a perfect low-chroma yellow-green on my first attempt, I thought his face may split in half.

It doesn’t sound like much written down right here, but I was proud.

I don’t want to move from here. I know I’m jumping, bare with me. I don’t want to move away from this area. It’s peaceful, it’s beautiful, it’s full of hippies, the land itself, I swear, oozes with joy and creativity. And so I don’t want to leave it. I have, in my life, lived in… 12 different cities or localities. None of them have made me feel settled, in none of them have I felt truly at home. Here… I still can’t tell for sure if I feel completely at home. But I love it, for all those reasons.

I know, I know where my passion lies. I think I’m lucky for this. I know there is nothing on this planet which compares to the joy and exhileration I get when I’m writing something intelligent, something I know I can be proud of… When I get that phrase whittled down just so, when I create an image I know will move my reader, when I build up a concrete argument in an academic essay… that is what moves me. Nothing else makes me feel so completely alive. I’m sure this sounds unforgivably geeky to some of you, but it is what is true for me. There are other things I love – art and gardening and mechanics and caring for people and being outdoors – but I know that if I pursue any of these other loves, I will still feel vaguely incomplete.

I am attempting, at this moment, to enrol in an extramural Masters paper in English. Because this is my path, I think. Nothing else is going to let me express myself so fully. I have to go back to University, and I have to complete my Masters degree. I have to obtain my PhD if necessary. Because the only thing I can see fulfilling me in the long term is academic work. Tempered with creative writing, of course, but I don’t believe that writing novels and poetry alone would fulfil me, even if I could forge a career out of it.

Which means I have to leave here. There is only so much I can do via correspondence – this one paper, in fact. Then I’ll have to go on campus to complete my Masters. And then I’ll have to work within the University. There is no University here. Therefore I can’t stay here permanently.

I have known for months that this is so, almost since I arrived here. And I think this is where my anxieties and stresses arise from. I do love this area, I find it beautiful and inspiring, but I know I can’t stay. It’s frustrating, because part of me want to settle in here, part of me wants that cottage by the beach and the sense of community with my neighbours. But I know I can’t truly have it. So I can’t start truly living here, I can’t make any proper definite plans or even form proper definite relationships. I just feel transient.