Suddenly busy, suddenly so busy, and I am trying so hard to remember how to be busy. It makes me think of the last time I was busy, in June of 2008, in the weeks before graduation. It seems so very long time ago. It seems like another life, somehow, and incomparable to the life I am trying to live now. If you permanently alter a fundamental, defining aspect of a person's identity, do you fundamentally alter the person? I feel different. I feel so different that I have trouble remembering June of 2008, and what it was like to be that busy busy crazy girl.
It is good to feel busy. I like my classes and generally I like my classmates, although sometimes I feel strangely old/young. Being around young people for the first time in a year makes me feel like I am twenty-four. At the same time, being around young people makes me feel used and beaten up and beaten down and like I've already lived my share, and I am just too damn young to feel this old. How to explain that to anyone? How to avoid having to? The freshman are teensy and nervous and too-loud and slow to load the bus and I find myself staring at them, awed that only six years ago I was one of them. I wore red shoes with paint stained boy's jeans and horribly knit scarves and cut my own hair in the dorm bathroom and couldn't imagine that I would ever graduate from college, that I would ever be grown up.
I went down to Homagin over the weekend to try it out--this whole visiting the island thing. I was excited on the way down and excited on the way up, so I suppose it worked fairly well. Admittedly, it was strange to be there. There were new baggers at the Best Value and some old pines had been cut down and the lawns were all brown. It was Fall, totally and completely, and I felt the same rush of sadness that visited me last Fall. These beautiful Fall days, all blue-skies and shapely clouds and new light, are heartbreaking in a way that makes me hate them. Yesterday I realized why, of the two metro stops I am exactly between, I always choose the one that gives me an uphill hike (the station at Dupont Circle) rather than the Woodley Park Zoo station. If I get off at Woodley I have to cross a bridge, something I thought didn't bother me. It does bother me, I find, unexpectedly, crossing that beautiful bridge. And I think, Damn. Uphill it is.
