it’s may 2007. that month and year that would never come. that graduation date that was always so far away. i have so many feelings in so many places.
i defended my thesis monday, april 23rd. final words of wisdom from my 
advisor on a post-it note: “smile confidently and often. look serenely at your audience.” apparently i did that. taylor took pictures, though curiously, none of them are in focus. conclusion: i am smart and pretty and i know a lot of things. afterward, at dinner, i could only really stare into space– rather numb in the wake of the culmination and climax of a year’s worth of work, stress, and sacrificed sleep, sanity, health, life. nothing can really be said besides, “victory is mine!” i wrote a book, basically. you’ll be able to check it out of the university library.
in other news, as my victory raged unabated last week, a girl callously broke up with a boy. well, i’m sure many boys were callously broken up with, but specifically my friend peter. there’s
a history there, of mutual affinity and bad timing. we’ve talked about how we should have dated two years ago, but neither of us said anything, and then i went to london and he met that other girl, the blonde callous one with no soft tissue on her body. i suppressed my then very basic crush and we spent the next year playing happily as friends, a natural trio: him, me, and third friend… definitely not her. even after he graduated, we stayed close, seeing each other when our busy and distant schedules allowed. but he called last week and i knew. i don’t even remember the words he used because all i could hear through the phone, like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell, was my feelings for him surging up to the surface, somehow stronger after their time beneath the rock under which i’d buried them.
last weekend we arranged to rally around him in rhode island and organize some fun. i skipped biology, he picked me up from school, and we gathered our friends on the drive to
newport. it was a weekend of comfort and cuddling. he slept with his head in my lap for most of the drive. in the small apartment, he volunteered us to share the queen bed to ease the pressure of sleeping arrangements for five people. the whole three days is both a blur and a string of bright clear moments which mass together in my head to confuse me. that moment on the sofa, while we were watching mcguyver, i touched his shoulder and he settled back against me. he came down with a cold, which i resigned myself to catching, and i handed him ibuprofen and rubbed his back. standing on the sidewalk, he rested his head on my shoulder and wrapped his arms around me. refused to let me chip in for pizza, whiskey, bagels. the whole weekend we functioned like a pair. he stayed near me; he clearly wanted me near him.
this is the part where i get irrationally ahead of myself and start thinking in circles. what does all that mean? what do i do with the feelings i get from him? is it real or did he just need me there for comfort and stability? a warm body next to him or more than that? it makes my head spin, and i didn’t know it could go all the way around and back again. it seems cliché, but 
peter isn’t like the boys i’ve let myself get involved with before. he’s not a moron, for one thing. and i have this sense i can’t explain– that we’d be good together. that somehow pete and i are built for each other; we’d be healthy and real. i can’t be a rebound for him; it would hurt too much. i have to be patient and not push him into something he’s not ready for. which means this is going to take a while. and i’m leaving jersey after graduation, in roughly twenty days. which creates the added difficulty of getting him down to maryland or driving the three hours to jersey frequently enough that we can build something. and he might be against long-distance relationships, anyway. is this just another patch of bad timing?
…and this all just goes to show that under the right circumstances, i can totally bring the crazy train. good thing the weather’s nice. fin.
where are you off to, lady? 