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[tell her i started believing in divine intercession today just so i could pray for her]

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oh, we bicker. we bicker so hardcore.

"they took all the faeries away! stupid isaac newton!"

-- guy in my medieval history class during a discussion about how everyone once believed in magic

so at least a portion of my life continues along happily as the slow march towards spring always should. i found the dynamic jacket technology for this moment, wearing my black zip-up sweatshirt under the brown coat to deal with both the warm and cold parts of the day, all so perfect for snowmelt-warm late february. the best parts are probably the afternoon medieval history classes; they always start slightly late and seem to end far too soon. i'm pretty much exactly where i need to be in a lot of ways listening to a lecture on the lay investiture controversy-- the semester of medievalism has its intended calming effect, my head full of aristotle and aquinas; feudalism, the spring flowers of chivalry, and dante.

in medieval philosophy today, someone asked very anxiously, as if he really, really needed to know, if angels could copulate with humans. absurd enough to be medieval christian theology.

not that life has lacked absurdity lately.

i can hear birds.

the city is sleeping, though i'm not sure if it was ever awake. i was looking out of the building on the other side of the sunset, reading about feudalism. claire came by and we started talking, sort of a continuation of that conversation we had about elementary school and those dreams i used to have about an extra floor on top of greenmont. those early grades are so cruel, grading random art projects and segregation based on reading ability.

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what do you want to do when you grow up?

have you ever seen that movie scarface? ok, leave out the last half hour or so, and it'd be just like that.

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greg cooked for the first time in a while and for the first time ever all the guys who are supposed to live here sat down to dinner together. i went back to my room right after and caught the scent of what it was like on the first day back in september once again, and for a moment i was enthusiastically taking pictures and listening to the sensual world and thinking of the best friends ever and not expecting october at all all over again. then lizzie came and we talked about religion and politics and religion again, and eventually just music before it was time to part and be students again. a short week ahead but a lot to think about.

so it has to have been almost a year ago that ashley and i became entranced by the sweet tones of new order's "age of consent," which, in my mind, has become a bit of a theme song for college since, and began to look forward to sofia coppola's marie antoinette. it didn't end up playing where we needed it to, so we missed the theatre run, but there were the magazines and the curious trailer (running in corsets!) and lost in translation, enough to get by until the dvd. now that i have said dvd and we've finally seen the movie, laughing along the way and feeling quite fulfilled after the long wait, the same feeling that i had on the night i went to bed early and listened to "age of consent" over and over again has come back: stylised, contemplative contentment.

i look at the rest of last spring and the summer that followed, last semester and last week. two direct points of reference: hearing about marie antoinette and finally seeing marie antoinette, and what a life between the two. from a distance, though, because the fullness of a moment exists only in the now, much of it is silence and scenery, as in the film; the actual words that were said have faded and it's the settings i can remember most clearly. and sometimes the soundtrack is wildly anachronistic.

i'm going home tomorrow for the first time in about a month and i'm not sure how i feel about that. it's only for a day or two, part of the long weekend, but every time i head back to dracut, no matter how much i've tried to distance myself from it by reason and the simple conclusion that most of the people associated with the place that cycle through my memories of a youth there have simply forgotten about me, it still seems like a robust cast of characters (just as i remember them) are living there and doing interesting things. and i want to take an aerial, authorial view and make a written world of it, but there's too much. and i've sailed past it.

new vistas open here in what was once the second life of salem: its icy, windy wasteland today making me slightly less affectionate for the place even as, internally, the long, cold spring i talked about back in december has been warming to that ideal between 70 and 71.5 degrees that picky weather people agree to be the only temperature not worth bitching about.

so today was a good day, great day, best valentine's day. anti-valentine's day? snow day. wintry mix day. driving in relatively unsafe conditions, a shopping mall that should have been full of giggling teenagers in love kept empty by the weather-- basically, ideal conditions. the un-valentine of movies: pan's labyrinth. i can only rattle off the elements of the day or relate the day's made-up verb, valentining, rather than write out why i'm so happy. and i am.

dear st. valentine,

thanks for being killed!

love,
the loveless.

i think about our diaspora sometimes, the memories we shared in our younger years in a hometown we can all call our own even though we've separated. some are farther away than others but thanks to technological advantage our generation doesn't necessarily suffer that affliction of lost contact that, throughout much of the type of society that is stable enough to care about such things, caused the "best years of our lives" to be pockmarked by a longing and despair for those who have left us behind and vice versa. it was the complete unknowing, then. now, if nothing else, we have a solid idea of where everyone ended up, and we all migrate back for holidays and maybe run into each other in the familiar places. we trade empty promises on birthdays or whenevers, the sort we've all apparently agreed shouldn't really burn our hearts in their insincerity; we all do it.

from a distance, we'll watch familiar faces change ever so slightly with the advance of the years and think back on certain moments (and we'll remember fewer each year until we begin to mix them and run them together, creating a composite image of youth that's made up of people, but not specific people) and wonder which moments are creating new memories in the lives of those who were once the world to us. we recognise that they are now the world of others, just as we are, and we'll become vaguely aware of the names of their friends and significant others through stories passed along on the rare moments direct contact is made. but it's a whole new life and there's no time to explain it all, so the image is that of a complete person up until about age eighteen. anything you know after that is fragmented and it will never be complete again. maybe we'll even meet some of these people our old friends have found new friendship in, but we'll quickly forget the connection of face to name after they are introduced to us as our heartbeats quicken at the sight once again of someone we can actually remember, vividly, as a child: a connection to a bright, lost world.

every time we go home it will seem less like a home, and that last year of high school and that last summer before college will seem like a different country that no longer exists; a blip, an experiment, something that we'll always wish had been more. and we'll have thoughts like this for years and years afterward, even though it seems silly to mourn for something like that as adulthood comes on.

but there was something to it, those days we shared just as we were coming into our own as people: just as we all started to get cars and go out to breakfast on pretty spring mornings and go out to movies on prettier spring nights. i turned twenty today.

kayleigh and i were talking about this after it came up in english lit class today, considering the dual nature of our collective reaction. it's symbolic: love is dead. if there was something good, it died a long time ago and may exist only as a curiosity in the fossil record-- it's pre-valentine's day, and we're bitter. also, it's hopeful: it's cute and moved us in that "aww" sort of way. plus the shakespeare entanglement. i don't know.

the word "neolithic" always instantly conjures associations with one of my favourite passages from haven kimmel, from the perspective of gods discussing humanity early on in her rewritten version of the book of revelation. it was painful to hold back from the conversation but simply too much to explain, and it's probably better just to read the whole thing. here's the part i copied out a while back:

"we loved watching her. they tell us time has passed and we believe them, and we know it must be difficult to imagine a genius in the neolithic era, no arts and letters, no mucking about with the atom, no cinema. hard to picture her there, rocked back on her heels at the edge of the water, contemplating the sublime and recognizing it as such without access to german philosophy of the enlightenment period, but that it what she did and who she was [...] she questioned what was inside and what was out. there was even in her physical comportment a harbinger of evolution not yet registered in the earth's mechanics: her forehead was smoother than her mother's, her arms were shorter, her back straighter.

but the moment we are thinking of, the one that caused us to let go a collective sigh that raised a tidal wave in an unoccupied coastal inlet in china, was the afternoon she sat on the beach with the small stones. she was solitary. she loved the company of her own mind, and rightly so. on this afternoon she was grieving the death of her third child, a hydrocephalic daughter born lumpen and covered with hair; the birth had split her mother stem to stern. during each pregnancy our beloved had searched for a stone, one as close to perfectly round as she could find, and before the stone was located she sat and drew circles in the sand with her fingertip; she drew them until a stillness settled in her solar plexus, quieting her, and she stopped when the stillness flowed down her arm and into the sand, and as soon as she had drawn the perfect circle the stillness flew into the air like a flock of startled seabirds, she could see them go, white, the sun a shock against their wings."

-- haven kimmel, "revelation," from killing the buddha: a heretic's bible

i am going to travel back in time with one specific action in mind: punching st. augustine in the face.

last night all the things i've been able to keep ahead of finally caught up with me, the collective emotion of several strange days crashing down all at once, manifesting itself as an actual physical sickness. there was so much of it: friday afternoon's revelations, the outpouring it took to get work done on my story later friday, saturday's morning of haunting dreams, the phone conversation with my sister, saturday night at catherine's, and finally yesterday's various academic and personal worries which culminated in the latest breakup about an hour before this moment i'm describing.

today, between bursts of reassuring laughter and what must have been a week's quota of sarcasm (even for me), i found myself utterly content, if frightfully cold. it's an unjust wind out there.

every time i plug in my camera to upload new photos, the first pictures to come up are those flower pictures from last may (see also the best banner on this blog to date, from the same period)-- there's much on there i've yet to delete. i see them and i long for spring and think of the rain the warmth and le nouveau monde and everything else that comes along with it for me. it's only february. i'm going to be twenty soon, i'm already losing my hair, and sometimes i think i know myself far too well.