The following is a piece I wrote at this time freshman year, and edited a tiny bit just now. It's quite strange to see where I was emotionally (in a way that I didn't not communicate here) and what I was thinking about. Probably more interesting to me than to anyone else, but somehow it seems appropriate to put it here now that I'm in the last stretch of my undergraduate education.
Removed.
“Clair, I don’t
think you’re drunk” says Marie, yawning –
her
knees bent and feet bouncing her little body up and down before she
plops down on Andrew’s bed next to me and sips some more yellow
orange juice and rum. I doubt that she should be drinking anymore.
Marie is on her computer and on occasion rocks towards me, the frame
of her computer nearly bumping into the rim of mine.
I’m
sober and thus isolated, uselessly. Isolation does not create the
craze that is romanticized as a byproduct of productivity.
(Imagine:
a thin
man locked up in his room for nights on end, composing his final
masterpiece. Imagine
another: cooped up in the middle of the woods, tapping into his
brilliant mind away from the humbug of his fellow human. Not fellows
at all!).
It
is like a normal night, all of us in one room. But
their minds are clouded gray. Isolation does not create independence.
I almost wish I was drunk with them, silly (or that they were sober),
but I had been writing and then I came, and they were already
inebriated. I wish that I didn’t care.
Only very few
people can be independent; it is a prerogative of the strong.
Yes, I am dependent on society—is that weakness? Is enjoying
companionship, preferring companionship—weakness? Is to feel lonely
in a group of friends removed by a few glasses of diluted yellowish
liquid—weakness?
And
does it impede one’s ability to produce?
Leaning,
swaying, smiling, giggling, and then dancing:
just the two of them, in the middle of the room.
***
Removed.
My
face is covered in the thin sheen of sweat, my breath is audible.
Hot
air in and out of my lungs.
I
feel almost lighter, perversely, melodramatically. My eyes feel
lively, darting around.
It’s
death I tell myself. Death. Just death? Death (panic).
Easter.
I saw
it and at first I thought the deer’s head had been ripped off. Then
I realized it was its tail, white fluff. Cold, wet, its long neck
swung over a rock so I couldn’t see the head at
all. I
raised my hand urgently, pointing at it and giving a panicked looked
at Emily who as scrambling onto the other side of the road: away from
it as I walked towards it, its large body cold, wet, four legs
jutting out of a large brown gray body. I looked at her walking away
and followed. It was raining. I
imagine its eyes, rising it from the dead.
I
can
feel my
sweat
now that it’s growing cold against my skin. We walked up the path
towards the water processing plants, yellow forsythia in full bloom.
I remembered that I hid in them one time in middle school, because I
didn’t want to walk back home yet. I came up towards it and smelled
the bright yellow flowers, grayed by the cloud light and rain, the
water dripping onto my face. Emily was standing making a face with
large eyes, trying to look vacant and dead. It seemed like one of
those moments when one tries to arrange ones facial expression to how
it should
look,
and more effort goes into that than actually feeling. She stood. I
stopped smelling the flowers, feeling that perhaps I should also make
a dead face. We
walked to the dorm. The tree branches let through water droplets,
there were deer hoof prints in the gray mud.
On
campus there were people; a violinist was practicing above in one of
the dorm rooms made of cinderblocks, a boy skateboarding by. I let
her go in front of me to open the door to our dorm and didn’t
(couldn’t) respond when someone in the common room said hi. Neither
of us could. We walked up to our rooms silently. I put down
the empty 40
bottle
I had fetched out the Hudson and took off my coat and sweater and
looked at my face, still
covered
in the thin sheen of sweat.
Death.
Just death? Cathartic because it brings my emotions into
perspective—they are nothing in comparison, but are also there,
solidly expressed in nature. The
tips of my fingers
feel lively; I write quickly with a tinge of guilt — perhaps my
classification of Emily's
facial expression as a simulated version of what it should be is
simply bitterness on
my part…
A
knock.
“Come
in”
“Okay”
“Is
it locked?”
“Yes.”
“One
sec…”
I
get up and open the door, Emily gives me tea and I say “come in”
again, and wave at the room for her to enter. “That was disturbing”
she says. Yes, yes it was. Disturbing. I should feel disturbed,
which I do, but mostly with myself by this point. My initial reaction
had been wrong, morbid even, like one of those old women who attend
stranger’s funerals to wail, in hysterics. But then all I could
think to do was write.
We
make small talk about work, and then about boys.
“I
think you should go after your trombone player” she says. I don’t
really want to talk about boys, so I shrug. I don’t really have a
trombone player either, but I know who she means. “Seriously
though. I saw him talking with a girl the other day. She was not
pretty at all”
because that’s it, right? Beauty—but I don’t want to pursue
this conversation, so I just say “He’s always talking to someone.
At chamber singing, behind stage, always. In Czech and in English,”
I sipped the tea.
“I
really think you should.”
“I
don’t really feel like pursuing anyone right now. Or anything,
really. Just writing and producing art” I say it straight out. My
voice isn’t bitter, but it isn’t bright and yellow either, it
isn’t forsythia.
“What
time is it?” she says, because she has orchestra rehearsal soon,
and we haven’t eaten.
“17,
do you want to go quickly to dtr?” after 5, that time of day when
nothing has yet been done.
“Yes,
let me go put on socks” but we have done something, we have seen a
dead deer.
***
Removed.
not
to be dependent on any person, not even the most beloved-every person
is a prison
It
seems that isolation is romanticized, that the virtues of writing or
painting alone in a room for days straight augmented: that it is only
way to go past normal human capacities for productivity, driving
oneself to the point of insanity to create. Genius (inspiration,
perspiration) is strange, seductive, a person willing to forgo
society for creation (isolation)…
I
am not alone, lying in the middle of Blithewood at night, a yellow
pink light of the road lamps shinning onto a yellow tractor, painting
out the yellow tinted leaves against the dark sky. It pushes up
against the creamy yellow columns, calm, strong, melting into shadow.
Little bugs flying, their transparent gray wings, and another person
is with me, typing, sighing at the trouble of work, listening the
sound of the waterfall in the distance, its water hushing, hissing,
humming. The air is warm and the clouds over the Hudson are gray; the
rumble of the cars in the distance, as well as the sounds of people
talking, reaches here.
I
enjoy the non-silence around me, the yellow lights, and the sound of
another person typing by me. But still, something inside me thinks I
want…full independence, full non-reliance, an unattainable illusion
of strength: this ideal.
The
misconception that pure isolation is the perfect
form of
independence, it plagues…And
when independence is attempted by someone who has the right to it,
but does not need
it, we have proof that this man is probably not only strong, but bold
to the point of recklessness
And
that (only) this recklessness allows for creation? Only the
independent are strong, and that this independence is ultimate,
uncompromising?
It
is a lie, but I can’t shake it.
