This is all too fucking hard. I wish that we could be friends (but I know that would destroy us both). I don't know what I want anymore.

My ear hurts. I am as blue as blue can be. I don't know why, but I feel it tonight. I miss you and I don't know if I want to. That's not fair, though. No, that's not fair. I know, I am terrible.

This is my last week of class. Possibly ever. I knew it was coming, I'd considered it before I ever left the upper hemisphere, but I've been so busy, life's been in such motion, I've only lately realized the impending situation. Tomorrow and Wednesday, then I am done. School is done and I am done. It must be so since all I've ever known is school, class, late nights and long days--I think it is me, somehow. Australia's been amazing, and I almost don't want to leave. But I am sad to have missed my last quarter at the institution that has been more a home than my home in these past four years. I am sad I have missed seeing those familiar faces, the acquaintances with whom shared grins and grimaces have expressed understanding of the struggle brought on by a particular professor or assignment. And not to say goodbye to the professors I admired and adored. That is a true shame. I am also quite disappointed I won't be walking come graduation day with my fellow classmates to celebrate the accomplishment (what the accomplishment is, I haven't quite decided, but it is, I think, worth celebrating). I think I don't want to leave partly because I love it here, and partly because I don't know what I will do when I return home. Without school, there is work, the so-called real world. But I think about it, and I see the world being closed off, velvet rope extended around those areas that only just before were wide open. I am afraid to miss out on the world. I wonder, from this experience (university), what have I gained? I can read Middle English and scant bits of Old, I can write an A essay in an all-night sitting, I can analyze and argue and compose, but what of that? I took my pants off in front of a class, sang the presidents song to another, crewed a show, took finals on two hours of sleep and I'm not sure what for, exactly. I have learned, I know that. I have made amazing friends. I have struggled and overcome and lost myself and rebuilt from the ground up, and still I'm not sure who I am, what I'm meant to be, where I should go next. I'm still shy and short on confidence and prone to bouts of delirious laughter after too little sleep. Puns and dry wit make me laugh out loud, as do occasional grammatical errors and spoken misstatements. I am further from my grasp of grammar and mechanics, probably, than I was before I started college (I know the rules, but my sense of them has faded--that happens, I suppose, when you start reading more works in which the rules are ignored or blatantly disobeyed rather than strongly adhered to), and closer to my knowledge of musical theatre and Elizabethan/Jacobean drama and politics. Aside from going to classes, studying, reading, reading, reading, learning, reading, writing, reading, and writing, I feel like I've done so little. Not enough to be done, anyway. Yet the unit count tells me I've done more than enough and I've met all requirements for graduation. This is all too strange, too sad. What happens when this has finished?

It's been a long, long time. I don't know what to put down here. I'm half a world away from any place I ever was writing before. That's literal. This land mesmerizes me. It is somehow all I expected and heaps more. It has stirred in me much, and I'm somehow less sure of things that seemed so solid only a month ago. But that's not true entirely. If I'm being honest with myself. I don't think I'm very good at that most of the time. Indecision cripples me, fear arraigns me, time crushes me. And honesty isn't always so straightforward, so neat and simple; many truths that seem to oppose exist at once, no truth less true than another. I think I'm writing only to fill this space. I think I'm writing only to sort this brain. I think I'm writing because I'm hoping to find a new answer to the question I don't want to ask, a new answer to replace the one I refuse to consider. I don't know what I'm doing, but I think I'm growing a way I never expected--distant. I curse this emotional geography.

I hate this desperation, the silliness and futility of it all. I haunt the silence with song, calling on the thunder, and hoping that the light will follow. But the absence swallows each note, and the days grow darker still. So I wander and float, distracted from direction by vague aspirations; I breathe vapor dreams- the shadows of stories by winsome phantoms planted in the pit of my soul. I reach to touch a one and scatter the vision like a mist lost to invasion corporeal. With each dream so felled, the gentle dissolution makes my own violent and intolerable. I would that I could get out of this place and into the brightness of the sun.

I float in the blackness of my room like red-glowing numbers radiating from an unseen face; they count down the minutes while I hang in a moment, locked in time like light locked in darkness, ornaments for a sleeping world. And the distance between us, time and me, is an arm's reach and all and never, but to grasp time now would be to break this space where everything is free and I am. So I close my eyes and lie in the emptiness of always.

Turning night into day, pulling hard, stealing stars; we're all selfish sometimes. Run, run, run, run runrunrunrunrunrunrun run run run run ... Oh, my lord, how do I fly?

I spent two hours after class today conversing with a familiar face. No one I really know. Or knew. All that had really passed between us before were hellos or quips about the banalities of mandatory discussion sessions with inept T.A.s. It was revealing and reassuring: I'm not the only one abandoned by perspective. I kept trying to think of reasons to leave, but she'd say something so resonant that I'd forget my task and remain, her willing captive. And the loveliness of the sun filtered through our words as they crossed the space between us. It's strange, too; do I call her friend? There's something enticing about letting it hang as a detailed discourse of the masked secrets and inner monologues of our daily lives, a spot of light bobbing in darkness. I doubt if we'll ever speak at any great length again. This world is so fantastic.

i want to make the walls crumble, throw my mad tumbling words at the world while your holding hands hold my heart and touch with sugar the darkest spots in my head the spots that float and dance in vision chased by swivelling eyes, dressed in desire's longest gown. that black thing that fills me grows and glows, the radioactive apathy of a hundred dying suns, scorches with a grin- i and me and you (we) fall toward an earth deadened by indifference. silence cried through empty smiles and unmeeting eyes. just a squeeze by your holding hands squeezed on mine broken please to tell me my worth. but we walk on, swinging arms loose-laced with fingers, limp and unwitting.

i'm absolutely mad. one stupid thought, sight, sound and i dissolve into convulsions of liquid emotion. i've rendered my world unstable so at every step i falter. the edge spins closer and i'm getting dizzier every moment.

i was good for a while. i thought. a while turns out to be a week and a half or something scant like that. i don't know what happens. i just plummet. i want to run. to run until my lungs burn and my eyes sting with wind and dirt, until my legs won't hold me anymore. really run. nothing metaphorical. i would if i had anywhere to do it, anywhere secret and alone. this city with all its people and its places isn't much for open escape. but we can all hide under the night and dingy neon, lost among the millions, stars distanced and smothered in the smog and lights of the sprawling city. i want something open and beautiful and pulsing. i just don't know what that is or where to find it. i avoid questions of how i am how things are how life is with indirect answers or sarcastic humor. nothing's horribly wrong, i see that. but something's not quite right and i can't set it right.

i'm feeling so uncertain about things. my heart shivers and i'm frightened. i'm tired of hiding and of crumbling under the weight of worries unnamed. i just can't seem to get a grasp on things.

i feel myself crumbling again and i don't know why. some flip gets switched and i crash.

it's L.A. i made my way across the sidewalks, wondering how much of the particulate matter in the air today is a courtesy of China, hands swinging, thoughts swimming, the bridge of my nose sweating beneath the weight of tortoise shell sunglasses. color scheme, not literally. i'm not cruel. the thought of sea turtles aplenty, spanning from ship to land in every direction, enough to walk across, straddles my mind as I cross the dirty asphalt of a dirty city. the heat of the sun, of the day, melting the tar and the rubber of my soles as they meet, mixing and mingling, the dripping tainting the ground as my feet and hands fluctuate in consistency, melting too. I am wax and my fingers drip away in great globs, splattering across still semi-solid fractions of heated earth. the heat invades my head, and my eyes go liquid as fluid thoughts leak from my nose and down my throat, tickling my tongue in its humid home. i walk in molten contemplation of the world before me, a future unknown.

i'm trying to turn the new days into old days i can think about and smile upon. some days it's noticing the wind on my face, cool in the heat of the sun that i love. others ask for a little more, something like dancing in the dark.

i'd like to be anywhere but here. some serene site with some serene sight. i'll take flight and maybe never make it home again. my broken head is breaking my heart, in more ways than one. the sun shines but the air is cool and i have everywhere to be, but here is where i am. i let my lids drop and the world disappears, all i know is all i sense. they lift again and no escape. just a dream that made my heart drop. everytime my body shudders in that repulsive convulsion, i hate myself more. for being weak, and wrong, and giving in to dangerous impulse. i'm rotting from the inside out, head to toe. but i won't fall down. to the ground. that would be too obvious. so it's a clandestine floating and i've got nowhere to push off from. no control, no direction. so i eat myself alive and pretend nothing's wrong. no, i never had a left foot. with a smile smile smile.

nobody cares. I feel like I can do nothing anymore. (But I want to do everything).

Pulling the miles beneath with mild ferocity in wild ambition to be conquered by the universe, I am the original American sentiment, which I never feel so strongly as when listening to the words of a Canadian poet, young in the most native way. But today I refuse to be the setting sun; today I rise over life as I sink barefoot into the earth, letting eternity soak my soles. Yes, I've got forever in my toenail.

I have got to find some direction. And soon. Sonic Youth was amazing.

Staring distantly from myself into everything that was nothing, I dreamt that I stood in my old backyard beneath the tree that bore green plums. Looking around, I felt as overgrown for the place (or the memory of) as the plants that climbed the splintered, leaning fence. And I wanted so badly to fit it again. For it to fit me as before.