bubbling brook
The highlight of my day is sometimes just driving down the long stretch of road with the music blasting. I mean really blasting. The kind of loudness that your parents tell you to never raise it to. But here I am, an adult raising it so that the thumping of the rhythms can vibrate through not just my heart but my knees too. And I admire the changes in the trees or the grass. There are changes everywhere, but sometimes they happen so quickly you didn’t even notice the change until it was over and done with.
I guess that’s maybe how things are with humans as well. We change. We cross the bridge without even realizing we did. You know, I come back and read through my entries and cry nostalgic tears not for lost moments but lost words. I cry because I dont write the way I used to. Its as if I have forgotten how to carve letters out of emotions. Now I just have emotions. They pass through me like a spring thunderstorm.
When you have 12 hour days and you deep in work, then you treasure moments. Like today when Thalia and I were walking and we literally stopped in our tracks and admired a tree with the falling flowers. They werent falling, Im sorry. Thats not the right word. They were dancing off the tree. A secret dance with the wind. And the smell! It was sweet. Even if Yankee Candle tried making it into their own, they couldnt. Why are humans obsessed with replicating smells? Isn’t the point of that sweet smell, the fact that youre standing in the sun, on a a warm spring day watching these white flowers innocently "have sex" [Thalia’s words, not mine].
Sometimes one of the things I cry about when I read my previous entries is that I have not changed at all. Which makes me wonder, did I want to change? I still pass by the building that offers career advice and they have a big sign "what do you want to do with your life? Come in and we’ll help" and you have no idea how many times I wanted to walk in there.
The problem is I have already invented myself. I have already invented myself as this phd neuroscientist person. Everyone that knows me, knows me as this. If I quit the phd track and walk away with a masters, so I can marry and live with the love of my life and start a family and work a 9 to 5 job, will they look down on me? I know other people’s opinions dont matter. But its hard to break through the inventions. To break through these invisible treads of expectations. But the truth is, I dont want to be like Alexandra, my advisor, who works 12 hour days every day and gets sick all the time because she barely sleeps and when she does sleep Im sure she dreams experiments. I dont want to be in my 30s and staying in a lab till 10:30pm with her grad student, and thinking about what should be had for dinner and how the cat at home is starving. I want to think about raising kids. I want think about so much more than just my job. I want more more more. But maybe that is just the position I will always be in, no matter what I have already . I will always want more more more. I have a condition, I guess. It’s called human.
Lately I have also been thinking about past loves. The passionate ones that fizzled out, and I wonder what happened there. I wonder if it was even love. I loved Mikey. There I said it. I met him here, and I fell in love with his words and passion and fire. And we burned. Oh we burned. And with burning, comes burning out. And we haven’t spoken in months. I want to write him letters upon letters. On my drive home, I usually write him novels in my mind of all the things I want to tell him. Oh and then there is Alex. He is getting married and inviting me and my boyfriend to his wedding. Oh Alex. I will always love him and we’ll be friends until we’re old and wrinkly. And I wont lie, there is a part of me that’s slightly sad that with him getting married there is no chance of us. Not that I wanted it. He and I would be doomed in anything other than a friendship.
im not sure where these words came from and where they were meant to go and whether they even made sense. But at least I have let them flow out of my fingers. And it felt good to feel that this river is not as dried up as I had once thought.