Visibility: Quarter Mile and Falling

It's raining again. We've gotten a lot of that lately. The ponds in the park across the street are filled to the brim, engulfing the roots of trees that are usually dry. I'm looking out my living room windows into a great blue-gray haze. It's punctuated about every 4 seconds with lightning and the trees lashing around. I wouldn't be surprised if I lost power at some point.

So, what to write about on a night like this?

I decided to defer to ... myself. This is an entry from my journal dated June 24, 1998. It's no glamorous work of prose, that's for sure.

Wednesday, June 24, 1998.

Summer vacation has begun at last. And yet, still within me is a feeling, which I struggle to identify and cope with.

On one of the last evenings, probably Wednesday. No, I am mistaken. It was Thursday evening. I spent the evening talking to [a friend] at the [residence hall] front desk. One of the last things that we talked about was [her]. "Are you going to see her again?" No.

"Isn't that hard on you? It must be difficult." You have no idea.

After I said farewell to her for the summer, I saw her again on Thursday in the lounge. As I walked through, I'm sure she saw me, but we said nothing and did not catch her eye.

Gripping stuff, right? It has good and evil, a prince struggling against unsurmountable odds, and a star-crossed lovers angle.

I'm only slightly embarassed over transcribing that entry, mostly because whenever I open my journal from those years, my room echoes with "woe is me" for at least two or three minutes. I offer it here as a sort of talisman; I'm trying introduce it to the public to innoculate myself against a further relapse at some point in my future.

This was written at the end of my sophomore year of undergrad. A common fixture of my journal through the start of my master's degree is that there's always someone "for whom my heart bleeds". I have no doubt that's an actual quote from someone in these pages.

But the other commonality of all those years? I never did anything about it. Not once did I talk to the object of my affection about how I felt. In hindsight, it makes my entire journal a big deal about nothing. Almost every entry is caked in hand-wringing of the tightest kind, but I never make any motion. My emotional journey was paused somewhere along the line: each day is exactly the same longings as the one previous, exactly the same slights and wishes.

Luckily, I always turned my silent attentions to people who were decent. It made it a lot easier to not be crushed when they went out with their actual boyfriends or laughed slightly too long at some guy's jokes.

From my current perspective, it's very easy to make fun of Andy from ten years ago. He's young, and he suffers from knowing too many books and movies, and not enough women. Ten years from now, in 2018, I'll be able to figure out if the place I'm in now is so much better (or worse).

I don't keep my cards quite as close to my vest now. I haven't been told lately that I'm unapproachable and distant, which is a plus. That means everybody's just *thinking* it, which is a total improvement from them telling it to my face.

The best improvement, though, is that I don't have to sit at the side and fill my life with imagined situations from movies and romantic comedies. Sure, some of those not-so-fun things have happened to me, but those failures and disappointments have been folded over into my current personality, which I'm pretty happy with.

That's what self-reflection has granted me: the chance to see how happy I am with who I have turned into. Lots of miles left on the road, though!
.

Comments