24 october 2007
alone. and in a city of ridiculous dreams. me; an entity apart from others. while I ride the bus through the dirty streets I am below the others, or maybe above, but definitely apart. not because I am a foreigner, but because I am alone: eternally so.
it is a city of hopelessly hopeful idealism. that is in fact why I came, not for real-life experience like my mother exclaimed or to get away as my father grumbled, but to live in a city of hope.
(there is one thing I have learned in the city of hope: trust not in angels, nor in stars, but be thine own savior. though I am an idealist, I am no transcendentalist; I am my own star only for lack of others. even as others flow through life and time and being I stand still.)
I say this not for pity, but for truth. truth is why I came here. truthful hopeful idealism: I said it was philosophy not naïveté because my eyes were open, but now I'm not so sure. now in my two-room dirty lonely apartment (that would feel so much bigger if I had someone to share it with) I am not so sure;
it seems I am never sure anymore.
college is over. college was bliss, with its philosophical cafés and libraries of answers; oh, if I didn't know I could look in a book (and I fell in love with those dusty tomes). now the warm bricks of campus are gone. ironic. when I was there I yearned for something else.
in a way I am the same; still the silly hope. even now, wandering the city, I feel that around the next corner something magical spontaneous beautiful will happen. in a dream I meet a passionate lover; he wears beatnik black and smokes (though he knows he'll die for it). we have dramatic fights outside of art galleries and reconcile with just as much drama. sparks fly. in another I spend all day writing a masterpiece; I change the world forever with a pen and a language. in my dream that is who I am, the tremendous beautiful loving living human being.
and yet;
I stagnate. I can barely breathe for emptiness/loneliness; I have no passionate lovers or brilliant works of art. I have my stubborn ideals and that is everything. all else is imagined. there are no words, there are no ways to express the biting fear and disappointment. I was waiting for my life to begin when I should have been living, and now I feel that it is too late.