Visiting

It's been a while since I've visited you, dear scribbles. But here I am, confiding in you again. My visits here are sparse. Oftentimes, it's because I have nothing else to do. Or maybe, its because I wish not to forget the things I think about when work has slowed down and I have time to think. A friend of mine once texted himself during a night of drunkness so as not to forget what he did. It seems like these brief moments of slowness are easy to forget.

It's December now and I'm curled up in my blankets hoping that I wont wake up cold. It's what I get for positioning my bed parallel to my window. I can feel the coldness emanating from the window pane. Two of my roommates will be leaving the country in the next few weeks. The year is going to end soon.

I'm turning 23 in two months. I'm making my plunge into the mid twenties, hoping that graduate school will take me to someplace exciting, hoping that I can practice a healthy sense of detachment to combat the feelings of loneliness that still appear in my head when I am by myself. I guess it doesn't help that my sleep playlist is filled with slow, minor keyed love songs.

Loneliness is a painful addiction. We convince ourselves of it, denying the smiling faces before us. And yet, on nights like these, when my house is quiet, I can't help but scream at all those images of Buddhist monks that I've been trying to mimic. Practice detachment they say. Realize that we are never truly alone, they say. And for brief moments, when the sun is shining and I walk down the street, I believe them. It's the fragments of time before falling asleep that cut the most. That time before our subconscious and subdue our overactive imaginations festers desire. Only now do I forget all those things that I have to do, graduate applications, wake up for work, applying for scholarships, going to the gym, and settle into the selfish desire of wanting to wrap my arms around someone. Wanting to feel those same arms holding me.

goodnight

Mitandersein

I've returned from floating around in my metaphysical universe to being a boy working retail in Pike Place Market while preparing his escape into the so-called real world. A lot has happened in my personal melodrama. But here I am again, spending a summer in Seattle, staring out at the world around me like a fish in a bowl. The academic year will start again soon, and with luck, I'll be motivated. This summer and the last year have been attempts to reinvigorate myself in the wake of a series of personal failures: relationships, scholarships, my personal health. I'll admit, I wallowed for a bit. I lathered myself with stupidity and let myself fester. Or, if seen in a more positive light, I've spent the last five months letting go of everything. I tried to practice hardline buddhist detachment in hopes that I might find something concrete.

At the end of this phenomenological journey, I found...myself. Only myself. I'm not talking about some kooky "self-finding spirit quest." I'm saying that in my four years at this undergraduate institution, I learned to accept help, to open myself to a community of dedicated individuals, to find friendship and connection despite overwhelming distances, a now, I'm back to the same lone wolf feeling that I had when I graduated from high school. The monotony of suburban California was fiercely isolating. Yet to accept the rigid definition of isolated alone-ness also denies the organicism of interrelation in any place. That is to say, even though I feel alone, I'm not really alone. (Even though that doesn't make me feel any better). So maybe the answer really is as Jean-luc Nancy describes. Maybe I am living in an "inoperative community" in which my society is "together" but "not-together." Or in more broad terms, I'm in limbo, and that's okay because everything is in limbo.

Totality and Infinity just starting to make more sense now. I guess that's how books like that work. The ideas only set in months or even years later.

good Others are hard to find. Maybe that's why alterity is so scary.