palace of winds

It’s storming again tonight, the growl of thunder outside my window nearly constant. Last night it started raining while we were walking back from Liquor Lyle’s, but I was warm and drunk and it felt wonderful, and the drops stayed glittering on my skin after we were inside.

I woke shortly before five to the dog just outside my door, barking at the thunderstorm. Only it wasn’t my door; after a disoriented moment I remembered that I was in my sister’s old bed. I’ve been sleeping there this past week to escape my mattress, which is so old I cannot remotely remember when we got it — fifteen years ago, I would guess. I’m getting a new one soon, but until then I will probably continue to wake confused, as I did again at 11:30 when the alarm went off.

I dreamt I was Buffy, and a would-be kidnapper had stabbed me in the back, about right-kidney-level. I was in the bus station across from the YWCA in Uptown, and I kept touching my back and looking at the blood on my hand and wondering if I should go to the hospital. I asked someone nearby, but they said to get there I would have to cross the street. I looked out across four lanes of speeding traffic cut through by a concrete median. I would have to walk blocks to a stoplight to make it across, and the effort didn’t seem wise. Later both Giles and Wesley discussed my condition (both my trauma over the attack and the physical effects) in hushed, watcherly voices. They had the public restroom where I’d been stabbed cleaned thoroughly, and when I finally braved it again I found it unrecognizable, gleaming white and smelling of bleach.

This afternoon I dreamt of swimming; I saw myself from the air as though watching a videogame, and saw the vague white finned shape of a shark cutting through the water behind me. I swam to escape it, out into the deepest dark-bluest wave-thickest part of the ocean, where I was lost forever.

May 15, 2004

We sat in the dim cool of Baldwin Hall for what seemed like ages — over an hour, anyway — waiting for things to begin. Talking about the future mostly, connecting briefly with old friends, batting our tassels away from our faces. I thought of the first time I’d sat in that auditorium: August 13, 2000, my eighteenth birthday. I don’t remember any of the speech the university president made that day; my mind was with my parents and my sister, whom I’d just said goodbye to moments before, out on the walkway in front of Baldwin.

It took us another age to snake around the quad and around Kirk, past Science Hall and Pershing and finally down to the stadium where we shuffled in, passing through a double row of faculty half-unrecognizable in their big black robes and hats. Then we stood in front of our seats, turned to face the bleachers behind us, playing Where’s-Waldo with the crowd.

The weather had been fitful earlier in the week, and it had rained just the day before, but the sun was high and hot in a clear sky, and soon we were all getting nicely roasted in our black robes. The preamble was mercifully short, the reading of the names understandably long. Carl and I played rock-paper-scissors (and went through an eerie streak where we put down the same thing at least a dozen times in a row) and thumb-wrestled and had odd little wars with the silky ends of our honor cords.

When all was said and done we went back to the quad to pick up our diplomas, and we took pictures in front of Baldwin and in the odd bright dappling beneath a large oak. We ran into Kyle (above right) but missed Courtney and Kamiah.

By the time we finally started heading back to my apartment I was exhausted, sun-wilted and thirsty. The apartment was surreal those last few days, stripped down and echoing, our belongings slowly vanishing out into the cars. My walls were huge and unfamiliar, giant white swathes of space, and I’d been sleeping fitfully.

I’ll always remember lying on that awful purple couch, though, staring up at the ceiling and breathing in the warm spring air and thinking Goodbye, goodbye.

How did it go so fast
you’ll say
as we are looking back
and then we’ll understand
we held gold dust
in our hands

I really want the pictures off my mom’s digicam, since those are from gradumuation, but I have no clue where the camera is, or if the plug for mine will work with it, since they’re totally different brands. Though! I think we use the same card, so I could always just stick the card in mine and… I’m going to quit rambling now.

Okay, so the ’skins’ links at left half work now. Firefox is still doing obscene things to ‘blue yonder’ so that isn’t up, and for some reason the javascript I’m using to switch the stylesheets isn’t holding onto the choice over at diary-x, so if you look at my journal (which there’s really no reason to anyway) it’ll always be Pi at the moment. If it weren’t so much work to un-link them I would, but it is so…please just ignore the temptation.

Totally obsessed. I adore Counting Crows. It makes me wish my name were Anna.

I really shouldn’t be updating right now — I’m supposed to be finding socks and shoes and my purse and phone etc etc so I can whisk off to Denny’s and the mall with Jo. I love love love shopping in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. It’s the best time to go, and I’m going to miss it if I ever actually get my ass employed.

I’ve decided I’m going to try for administrative assistant jobs. I’m overly-anal, I like making lists, I love tidying up other people’s things (but not my own, which is odd — well, I love having my things tidy, I just fizzle out on the actual process).

And now I’m going. Really.