My Last

Here I am writing my last paper. Listening to Maria Taylor's Leap Year, which is the kind of song I have always loved and makes me feel like I have achieved some emotional fulfillment - that melancholy sweet bubbling in my chest and at my temples that I can be so in love, can be so brave, can be so strong and so vulnerable all at once. And I thought of burning the CD to take with me to the library tomorrow morning, so that I can listen to this beautiful song, bob my head, type my paper, print it off, live in this private but on display world where everyone can see that I am enjoying this music, enjoying my life, that I have something beyond the paper I am writing...

And then I realized that I will not be part of that community any more. I won't be in that private-public, on-display but on-my-own place where I exist as my own person but am so easily identified and defined as a student, preoccupied in the same things as everyone else: grades, classes, quarters, midterms, papers, men, alcohol, frat parties, dancing, bars, weekends and snooze buttons and limited budgets. I hadn't realize how much of an act my on-campus life could be, but it is. I have reveled in what I could present to other people, have manipulated my appearance through fashion, makeup, hair, the purse I carry, the shoes I wear, the look on my face or the confidence of my stride or my stroll or my swagger or my all-out run. This identity will be gone. And then, I am in the working world, one of so many more, and I can still present those things, but I will no longer be a part of that community where everyone else is trying to pose and present just like I am. I am headed into the vast world where it will not be so easy to pretend I am cool, I am confident, I am fine being alone in my world with my music. It won't be so easy to pretend because I am far less certain anyone is watching. Have I desired my whole life to have someone watching? Have I imagined my whole life that someone might be? I think so. I know so. Can I come up with a Big Brother when I'm out in that real world I'm supposed to confront soon? And if I can't, can I let go of that desire to be observed?

In my last days, I am returning to the long nights, the nights of procrastinating by getting down to the root of life and scratching at it to see the wick. The good old days with Sheila and the long nights and the treks to White Hen and the glow of our desk lamps in the windows and the harshness of computer screens and beeping alarms and warm beds and too-short catnaps that became too-long night's sleeps... The horror and the joy of those nights. The thrill of being alive and awake when no one else was, alone in a grey-blue night turning into day.

But I am too old for this, it seems. And so I return to my paper, too quick for my old self, but barely quickly enough for my new self who values sleep and not seeing dawn from the wrong side and getting to sleep in my bed with my partner and not feel that heavy curly-haired feeling under my eyelids.