Ah! There is good blood in that old city...

I let a day pass by about a week ago that would have marked the one-year anniversary of my having moved into dorm at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, where I studied for three months before returning to California and UCI. Others of my friends who went abroad with me posted Facebook statuses that caused me pause, and wonder if so few words and such simple sentiments could really package up and present any kind of respect to or memory of their trips abroad. I like to write...obviously..., and it seemed a good occasion to try to write of some of the experiences I had whilst abroad, but I second-guessed myself and ended up forgetting about it until I was awake at 1:45 AM and realized that it was the next morning, and the day had slipped by unnoticeably. I felt a sort of relief, a release from the pressure of performing to an expected, regular, standard ritual. A year ago today I moved into a place and that was the first day of like ninety days that I spent away from home and I met some good people and had some good times....etc.

I thought to myself later--well, it’s good you didn’t write about it on that day. It meant something to me in a way that pulled at me insistently when I realized that it was 19 September that day. And as is an annoying habit of writers, I began to retreat into the lucid imaginings that are located, for me, abroad....walking through autumn air so cold that I ceased to be able to locate my nose on my face without reaching up and wrapping gloved fingers around it and having that be a nice thing, the crowded streets of Paris near Christmas scented like hot wine and chestnuts. I thought to myself, well, it’s a good thing you didn’t go all the way in. It’s good to distance yourself. This is your life now. This hot, dry, Southern California, hot and dry well into autumn. You live here. You live here.

I’ve written before that I’m not sure I do live here, but acceptance of that idea has, frankly, gotten me into a lot of trouble. So I’ve been working on it--getting better at living here. Going out with friends, wearing shorts more, not putting sunscreen on my face every day. I haven’t been to the beach in ages, though. I’m sure my re-immersion into my Southern California won’t be complete until I’ve put my feet in the sand of the coast where I spent so many of my childhood summers. I’m trying to get better at remembering that these memories--of watching the rip tide float half-way into the horizon, of finding sand in my underpants and hair for days after a beach visit, of jogging to the coast for P.E. a few days a week in junior high, of invading tide pools and catching sand crabs and bodyboarding ferociously--these are real. And they count for a lot. My mom’s old mini-van, in which we took trips to the ocean frequently, should be as real to me and as important to me in memory as the double-decker busses that I took six of seven times a week for three months while I was in Norwich--it should be more important. Or--I don’t know. 

A big trouble about living so much inside my head is that I forget that what’s not in my head is important. Some people tell me that what’s not inside my head is actually more important. I’m poison to myself; I’ve known that for a long time, now. But people like me who are poison to ourselves are also poison to ourselves because we’re okay with that. Me--I’m so afraid to lose any of the things that I feel like I have sometimes, and I use this occasionally to justify my frequent trips into non-reality. Except it’s real for me. So there probably needs to be another term for that. My dad always taught us and still insists that there’s only one actual reality. This makes perfect sense to me, but still, there’s something I’m living in a lot, whether or not this is harmful to myself and difficult for others, that’s on some sort of parallel plane, and I’d like a name for it. Maybe I’ll work on that. I don’t much like “delusions” or “la la land,” etc. Let’s think of something that notes at its devastation and doesn’t sound like an errant sound escaping from a three-year-old’s mouth. 

I meant to write a really different blog. I’ve just had the first two days of classes of my last year at UCI. Right now, I’m just going through the motions--gathering school supplies, battling lines at the bookstore--you would not BELIEVE how long they are, it’s astounding--sitting in class, struggling to raise my voice to speak from the back of crowded lecture halls. 

One thing I will say before working on another post to describe some things about classes in detail, is that, with the beginning of each new school year or quarter or whatever, I incur a fresh, acute fear of being run over by a bicyclist. I have been walking around looking over my shoulder so often that people are probably going to think that I’ve developed a compulsion. But, it’s like, bicyclists have some sort of record to set on the first few days of classes or something and have to hit a certain number of students before their crazy-bicyclist-on-the-way-to-class reputation is thoroughly installed. 

I’ve actually only seen two people toppled before, but that’s two more than I should have seen. I used to find it just crazy, but let’s think about it--who needs to ride a bike to class? What kind of person is that? When 90% of us can make it there on time fine on our own two feet, why are bicyclists in such a hurry that they need to run people over? After careful consideration, I’ve found that I think they’re probably people with a different set of priorities. Actually--that’s obvious, right? Most people probably have “not running people over on my bike” pretty high up on their unspoken list of things that are important to them. 

*title taken from George Borrow's Lavengro, in reference to Norwich

late july

This morning I went to help the Campuswide Honors Program register new freshmen into SPOP (Student Parent Orientation Program). When I told my dad last night that I was going to go to campus early enough to get there by 7 AM he asked me, Why do you always sign up for those things? I told him I didn’t know....I don’t actually know. I always feel compelled to. And then I told him, this is my last time helping out at one. I don’t think it convinced him that I am any more justified in the escapade. 

I think, out of all the forces that guide me throughout my day, one that I am quite sensitive to is that of possibility--I think I have found myself, over the past three years, returning to campus on early mornings to help with these events because of moments like what I experienced yesterday, cleaning the mirror in my bathroom--I found it necessary to ask myself, sternly, wiping over my reflection in circles, what I expected out of the next morning, and all I could answer to myself was that I never knew who I might meet, who might meet me, who might be changed. I am not, by a very long shot, the brightest or the friendliest student that the CHP has to offer. I am probably not even properly qualified to serve as a “face” of CHP, because I have never felt very at home within its community. But I’m drawn back to it, again and again, drawn back to volunteer opportunities that involve greeting and meeting new students, because I think there is a possibility that somewhere amongst all of them there is someone like me. Awkward, strange, discontent and all. 

Mostly--I envy them. I look at them all, new-faced, excited, innocent, willing, eager, and I think to myself, Lily, didn’t you have good hopes for yourself when you were in their shoes, didn’t you wish to be somebody really great, didn’t you have this reluscent vision of all that UCI had to offer you....didn’t you wish to become a good person, to meet other good people, to fall in love, to find a niche....? I did. I know I did. And I’m looking back at my last three years and thinking, did it really happen? Am I anyone at all? If, somehow, I could have known who it was I would have become when I was new-faced and willing, would I have still chosen to move forward, in this direction? I really don’t know. I think there are a lot of things that I could have done better. I could have been more graceful. I regret a lot of things--friends often, encouragingly, but somewhat misguidedly, tell me that it’s the things that I won’t do that I’m going to regret someday, and that might be true, but I regret a lot of of the things I’ve done, too--the people I’ve lost or pushed away, some of the clumsier things I’ve done, some of the choices I’ve made....I don’t regret being shy, and having a hard time making friends. Because the people I’ve met are beautiful, and I need them. I couldn’t have met better people. So if I had to have been me, this is one of the best things that could have happened--that I didn’t know who I’d be, so I’d make the same choices, and so that I’d meet the people who would help me become better....I’m a very shy person, and I’m a late bloomer--socially, I’m immature, shy, clumsy, and when I do reach out I am upon entirely fresh, petrifying ground, and though I have been unsuccessful in a few attempts somehow I am stubborn enough to pursue the people who interest me anyway....

In the same way I suppose, I keep going back to volunteer at the CHP events. I remember two years ago at the “Experience Honors Day,” a day in which prospective CHP students and their parents come to tour the schools, a very small-statured Chinese girl and her parents kept pointing at my nametag, which said “English Major with an Emphasis in Creative Writing”--and I remember that the girl was nearly crying with excitement, because she wanted to be a writer, she had written and illustrated some manga before....I told her about the opportunities I had already had to work with the faculty and to take classes doing something that a lot of people told you, no, wasn’t going to get you a job and wasn’t going to put you into a very liquid job market, either, and I told her about the ways that I found it worth my time, maybe even more so because of that, because, what they don’t tell you is that having to live with question, with darkness, with the strangeness of one’s own compulsions as they oppose reason or security--that’s all preparation for life after college, too. Perhaps it’s even more valuable preparation than all the “job-prep” major tracks. Having to be at peace with yourself when you know you are not doing something that makes sense according to the majority of your peer’s concerns is a skill that you have to learn like any other. I told her this in softer terms. I told her that as uncertain as my future was, I was sure that right now, I was going the right way, that I was doing the right thing for that day. I remember that she was still too moved to speak, but her parents both thanked me extensively. I ran into them later that day while I was walking through the park and they waved to me and thanked me again. I think, really, the moment didn’t have much to do with me. I still wonder how that girl is doing--if she decided that UCI was worth it, and if she did, where she was, and if I’ll run into her in fiction classes, ever.

Today my job was to stamp the hands of all the students waiting in line with a little anteater. It’d be their lunch pass. The day could have easily been a success without me, and for a couple minutes toward the start I was self-conscious of this fact, but I started asking kids where they were from and a few of them opened up to me and I was touched by how gracious they were, and  I became excited for them, for their futures. When most of the students had gone through the registration line and had entered the seminar, a third year nursing major approached me and introduced herself as Beatrice. She saw that I was a fourth-year by my name tag and said something like “how exciting!” and I must have not looked excited because she said quickly, “and scary....” I said I was sure I’d be excited closer to when school started.

And I’ve struggled with it, and I realize that it’s selfish and pointless to worry, and I know in my heart that I am doing the right thing and I have the rest of my life to decide what to do with myself, but I don’t feel very useful on this earth, and I am scared, I am so scared, for what I don’t know. I am probably more scared for my future than I have ever been scared for anything in my life. I try to take the advice of my elders, people who care about me the most--do not worry, it is useless to worry, do what you can with today. And for a large extent, I am able to live day-to-day. But this--this is a beautiful world. This is a world of consistent beginnings, of peering into darkness, entering that darkness, and emerging from it, which is a victory itself, whether or not we plunge straight into another darkness....this is a world of forever-possible renewal, but with that comes the strangeness of unfamiliarity. Every day I am made stranger to myself, every day I’m getting to know myself more. And I am happy, at times. Sometimes I am overwhelmingly content. And sometimes I feel this need for the future like the need that arises out of a presentiment of loss; the preciousness of things being magnified, prismatic. We say, precious, and what we mean are jewels, which absorb and throw the light in short witty glints. But what I mean are the small things held in the hand, recognized as vital, with heartbeats of their own, and held close to the heart. The things felt against the palm and the heart at once. Bird in the hand. Bird in my hand! 

I left today with my hands covered in the ink from the re-filler bottle for the ink pad. Sometimes moments in my life feel entirely mimetic, as if they speak not for themselves but for a larger idea, and for that idea only. But today I’m just going to be a girl who has ink all over her hands. 

I try to be content with what I have...but this is a beautiful world. With all the good there is out in the world, available, willing to be had--with all the futures out there, ready to be had, existing to be had--with all the air in the world to breathe, knowing this, seeing these things, how can I not want it all?