2010-06-09
all i have to do is dream
Listening to Beach House has me feeling that familiar pull upon my heart, the tug of yearning. Even if it's vicarious, it's real. Or at least as close to it as I'll get, besides this flickering memories.
It kills me that I still trust you in my dreams. I trust you with my life. Unthinkingly, undoubtedly, as natural to me as breathing, in my dreams, you are my safehouse. I'm not even sure I trust you in real life any more. I don't know you well enough anymore to grant you that. But in my dreams, you are my cureall, my hero, my ultimate place of peace and happiness, an incandescent serenity.
If you were that to me in real life, I would love you forever and ever and ever.
I am also scared of that sort of love.
I remember back when we were ending, when I could see there was no way I could save it, no matter how hard my heart wanted us to earnestly try again. I missed you already, and it tore at me inside. I took a walk alone, through the trees. I climbed up one of them and straddled its thickest branch, my torso coming down to meet the wood and my cheek resting on the rough bark. My back heaved a bit as I exhaled my despair, my legs dangling down, my hands hugging the branch I laid upon. I sat up, snapped off a sharp end of a nearby twig, and started carving in our initials on the tree as I sat upon it. I traced the letters till the grooves were etched deep. It was my last ditch effort, my desperate attempt to get back the good we had, if I could just immortalize us on that tree.
I'm sure the etches have faded now, eroded by time. And I don't want you like that anymore. How could I? To want that would be to want my former self. And I know there are parts of that which I dearly miss, but I must continue to move forward.
I am missing home right now (maybe things are getting tangled because you were 'home' in my dreams), and this homesickness is a discombobulating feeling, because it is a jumbled and conflated sense of missing home/my family/Montana and missing all that is Carleton. I don't anyone in this city, so of course I also feel alone, and I want to have some meaningful (ie emotional) interactions with the people in my vicinity, and that is going to take time (we must be genuinely invest, and it can't be deliberate).
I am doing research on working memory capacity, and the strategies that individuals employ to overcome the limitations therein. These studies are conducted both upon toddler and adult populations in order to explore the possibility that there might be some kind of innate capacity which allows people to hierarchically and efficiently parse different sets of stimuli. I'm on the 11th story of a building at Harvard with an incredible panoramic view of Boston. Now that's a dream, a real-life dream.
But no matter how much our dreams from waking life come true, at the end of the day what we really want is a hand in ours, some bold and steady eye contact, or just someone to talk to about how our day went. Someone there for you, physically and metaphorically. It's the sort of time where-- even though I'm glad I'm the me that I am now, and it's not rational because it's best that we're not together-- ...that I kind of miss you.
leesah-likes at 7:57 p.m.