It's been a while...

One continent and nearly 3 months have changed since my last entry. I've been suffering from a most severe case of writer's block. Whom does this effect? Well, I really don't know who reads this so perhaps just me. And why? Oh I don't know. Lack of time, general malaise brought about from the normal-hour-workweek, filled with filing things and stuffing envelopes for my internship, wrapping up wine bottles for my job, and some philosophy and writing classes sprinkled in between. Yes, perhaps this has led to my writers block...so can I, as a writer, exist within a routine? Here's hoping.

the blues...

I once heard that to sing the blues you had to feel it, that if you weren't feeling any pain, you just couldn't possibly be playing the blues. So it makes me wonder, to listen to it do you need the same? Can you listen to the blues and not have the blues?

See, I could make a prayer out of a good blues riff of bass line I listen to. That kind of beat, tone, vocal layering, repetitive rhythm that won't allow you to sit still and those addictive guitar cries, that's what makes me close my eyes and go somewhere completely metaphysical where I can't be bothered by anything aside from the beating heart and soul of music. That's what stops time, or realistically doesn't stop it at all, but takes my focus away from it, takes away the power it has over me. No, I don't think you have to have the blues to listen to the blues, but it certainly takes you somewhere, to sometime you've been hurt or felt too much weight on your shoulders. So then maybe you have to remember what pain or intense passion feels like to really play the blues and when you listen, you just connect.

Sometimes I wish that time had a heart; I wish that time's heart could be broken, that way it would understand the way all of us. Time has no sympathy and sure as hell no apathy, but if it did, than maybe it would slow down every once in a while. So maybe I wish time could play the blues.

What kind of music does time play for you?

ain't that something worth writing about

memory's a game we've got no choice but to play, holding onto moments momentarily our own and when we blink we tend to miss them and we miss them though we never had them in the first place. we can take a picture but the lens steals a bit for itself some part of the time in time we'll come to try and recall and we'll put our heads against the wall and ask to go back but to no avail because it's all a one way forward flow we've just got rear view mirrors and all's closer than it appears or maybe it's the other way around but it doesn't really matter, really. time escapes usor we escape time or however we choose to part time doesn't care, doesn't have a heart to be broken by anything or anyone, isn't that a lonely thing? smile through the tears, we do, it's good to feel a little. forgive me if i've run off course i must be in a real right state thinking i'm so eloquent when i stutter, i'm a little crazy but hell we're all a little out of control, control, that illusion we cling to in our ocean 'til it dissolves or evaporates and we drown, or, we trust the tides. who am i to write this all down? just a girl on a train playing the memory game.

You look best dressed in happiness.

A little girl jumps up and down on her parents' big queen sized bed.  Compared to her bunk bed, she's jumping up and down on an enormous sea of pillows.  She's allowed to jump on the bed when her mother's around, 'I'll catch my little monkey before she falls,' she always hears.  She wouldn't jump on the bed without her mother around anyway; what's the point?  She likes her mother's attention perhaps even more than the sensation of her curly blond locks bouncing up and higher than her whole body does while she is free and airborne. 

There's a skylight in her parents' room, so she always makes sure to jump in the center of the bed, as if she's jumping into the sky, like she's taking off to fly.  Today the sky is like a hundred lines, all different shades of purple and blue and a few streaks of yellow.  It all blends together, gorgeous and pastel, and she imagines that if she jumped into it, she'd create ripples in the plum, lilac, powder blue and indigo, making a design like the pretty edges on the dessert plates she's seen in fancy restaurants.  She wants to dive in so badly, like nothing she's ever wanted before or could ever imagine wanting in her lifetime.

She sat down, or rather, bounced and landed with her feet swinging off the side of the bed.  She looked at her mother, blue eyes meeting blue and asked, "Where's the top of the world?"  "The highest place you stand," her mother replied, bemused.  "Well, how can I get there?  Have you ever been there?"  Her mother had an expression on her face that the girl couldn't recognize.  After a few moments she said, "If you believe."

Later that night the girl had vivid dreams.  First she was tiny - so small that the lillies of the valley looked like huge church bells.  She climbed to the highest bell, peered over, and all of a sudden she was on top of an oak tree.  She looked up and when she looked back down she was on the wings of a nightengale and she closed her eyes only to open them and see she was on a mountain peak looking down at the moon's reflection in the water.  She stared at the moon, and in that moment, woke up. 

She walked into the kitchen to find her mother drinking coffee and reading the paper before she had to leave.  Her father had already left for work.  She sat down next to her mother and drank milk out of her favorite mug, pretending it was black coffee like her mother's.  "What if you can't make it to the top?  What if you never stand at the highest place?"  That same expression.  "You just have to believe, baby girl."

That little girl grew into a young woman; she went through the trials and tribulations of being a teenager, went to college, started smoking, quit smoking, travelled, fell in love, wrote a book, adopted a puppy, got married, bought a small house, and always made it home for holidays with her family.  She had a baby girl of her own whom she named after her great grandmother, and who had the same blue eyes as her mother and grandmother.  When she brought the baby home, her mother gave her a book.  The cover was black, and inside were pages upon pages of her childhood - photos, poems, trinkets, dried flowers - all the way up to the present.  The last page was a photo taken when she must have been just born.  Next to it was written, in her mother's perfect cursive, "This, my baby, is the top of the world."

mice, amongst other things.

One of the tasks I have been assigned to is cleaning out the basement of the Loyola Nachbar Huis.  I did not know there was a basement in the Loyola Nachbar Huis.  The basement of the Loyola Nachbar Huis is terrifying.

The stairs are creaky, and it's this ancient looking corridor with doors on the left and right that enter into more rooms that are dark, cold, and smell pretty funky.  It reminds me of a prison or something from the middle ages; I expect to see a man holding his arm out from behind bars with a bone attempting to entice the dog with the keys around its neck to come over.  

I start working at 6 am because it is so hot in Belgium and my delicate body cannot handle manual labor in extreme temperatures.  What is glorious about this job is the fact that I can roll out of bed, put on some clothes, have a cup of coffee and walk downstairs to work.  So anyway, I walk all the way downstairs to work in the basement.  I'm carrying up boxes, broken toilet seat covers, old computers and awkwardly shaped bags filled with god knows what.  But I'm also carrying up boxes and boxes of just...people's stuff.  It's all from years ago...10 or 15 years ago, all belongings people left, perhaps intending to come back and collect.

I was simply carrying up the boxes until I worked my way to what I'll call the 'damp area.'  Word to the wise, if one tries to pick up a cardboard box when the bottom has been eaten away by moisture and time, it will break.  The contents will spill everywhere.  If you're lucky like me, a huge dead mouse/rat will fall at your feet and its surviving children will scamper away from you further into the creepy corridor.  After jumping up and down yelping a few times, I disposed of the dead mouse and proceeded.  The next bag contained a fur coat (which, after the aforementioned experience, appeared to me at first glance as a mutant super rat), and a few beer glasses.  The other boxes contained various things...old papers, files, books, a few pictures, a few geodes...keepsakes.  I wonder about the people who left these things.  I picked up a colored pencil drawing from one of the boxes...its ripped edges tell me it came from a sketchbook.  A pretty landscape graces the page, a blue sky strewn with clouds...its very pretty, and I wonder, why'd this person tear it out of the book?  And why did he/she keep it?  Why didn't he/she come back for it?

Its funny to be going through other people's things.  I'll never know who this person is, but I've got a piece of his/her sketchbook hanging on my wall because I think it's pretty.  I know that life isn't about material things, you know, that 'the things you own end up owning you.'  But nevertheless, I'm fascinated by belongings.  I find it interesting, the items people choose to keep, to hold onto.  I'm touching things that a while ago, people possessed, wanted to keep.  It's like a little connection across time.  Every box could tell me a story, if I wanted it to.

stayyy, just a little bit longer...

So as I mentioned in my previous post; I'm sticking around Leuven for an extra few weeks.

(3 months ago...)

Opportunity: I shall present myself in the form of a summer job.

Me: Ah, opportunity, you interest me.

Opportunity: I shall present myself in the form of a summer job which requires you to stay in Belgium.

Me: Well you're very enticing, opportunity, because as luck would have it, I've very much enjoyed Belgium.

Opportunity: Is that coming from you or the  Rochefort 10 you're holding in your hand like an oscar?

Me: ...

(present day...)

Me: This house is empty! My feet hurt! I have no air conditioning!

Opportunity: Oh get off your high horse.

Me: What high horse? Come on... I don't want to work, I just want to play.  And I want the last 10 months to replay.  On repeat.

Opportunity: Do you hear yourself?

Me: Yes, why?

Opportunity: See the forest for the trees.

Me: What does that even MEAN?

Opportunity: It means; relax.  You're going to be okay here.

So my biggest chunk of comfort zone left me.  More pieces of said zone will exit soon.  What's a girl to do?

Try something new, be positive, put some effort in, and hopefully continue etching away at this sculpture-in-process I like to call "Peace."

"Tick tock, try to stop the forward motion...

... all heads tend to fall behind, wasted withers of the wish cut steeper is always running out of time." - Motion City Soundtrack 

Running out time, huh..hm...

So as I sit here, a bit buzzed from white wine, I am of course, thinking about the end of study abroad.  In a week and a half, my new American friends will fly off back to that land that seems so oddly close but still so far away.  Home.  And it's weird.

I've never been good with endings; I'll admit to that freely.  Those sayings about every ending being a new beginning, or every closing door opening another, or, it's not a goodbye, it's a see you later (my personal least favorite) never cut it for me.  Sure, I know it's true.  Something else is going to start when this ends; I get it.  But that never makes it any easier for me.  I remember back to the summer before my freshman year of college, remember talking to my brother's former room mate, and he was asking me how I felt about getting ready to go to school.  I told him I was excited for college, but not sure about leaving what I had right then.  He told me that was great...nothing better than loving where you are and being excited about where you're going.

Yeah, he was right.  What he said is still right.  How could anything be better than that?  But here's the catch.  There's an in-between - a transition.  And that's what trips me up, like switching from 4/4 common time to 6/8.  It's hard for it to be smooth.  I'm just not good at it.  I don't know what it means, really, or what I want.  Do I want things to last forever?  I don't think so...I'm not that naive or short sighted.  But what I've realized is that in-between bit?  It's terrifying.  At least for me.

Here's the thing.  I always brace myself; always.  I make changes, endings, harder on myself, because I'm strained, I'm trying to hold on, stand in front of time and stop it, but that's roughly as successful as throwing your coffee cup at the train when it's leaving without you because you were a few minutes late.  I can't stop time, but I try, I brace myself for the affect it's going to have on me, some sort of life changing epiphany that comes from a new phase in life.  But guess what...it never happens.  Sure, it's a shock.  Certainly, things are different.  But it's like I clench my fists, close my eyes, tense up my jaw and wait - and when I open my eyes, it's different, but I didn't feel a thing.  Do I want to feel something?  Would that make it better, easier?  I don't know...but I don't.  It just... is.  Time just goes, goes and goes, and as much as we feel left behind by it sometimes, truth is, it's our time, so really, we're right there whether we like it or not.

I'm not saying nothing has changed.  A lot has.  Hell, I feel like a completely different person than I was ten months ago.  But could I tell you precisely when it happened?  Not a chance.  That's how it always is.  College changed me from the girl who graduated in 2007, and if you wanted to know when, I'd toss a dart at a calendar and tell you plus or minus 9 days.  And this summer will happen, I'll stay here working or doing whatever it is I'll be doing in Leuven until August, and I'll brace myself again, fall asleep on a plane, be back in Philadelphia, PA, and you know what?  I'll be in Philadelphia PA, and I'll keep going.  Then I'll brace myself again and move into my house for senior year.  And I'll open my eyes and be living with 5 other girls in Baltimore.  And I'll brace myself again and again, and my life will change and move on.  But the truth of the matter is, bracing myself for it, being scared of the end?  It's pointless.  The real shocks, the things I need braced for?  Those will hit me when I haven't more than a minute to realize what's going on.  Those are the big things...the things worth worrying about probably won't be something I can prepare for in advance.

I guess what I'm saying is, life moves on, and sometimes you're in such a rhythmic motion that you don't even realize it, 'til you've switched tracks and it's smooth because it's been planned all along.  So endings like this?  Like the end of an absurdly wonderful experience?  That's a smooth track switch, not a de-rail, so I suppose I should save my worries for a real shock.

Maybe now it would be appropriate to explain the title of my blog, "be careful if you turn around."  Truth of the matter about this blog is, I don't know who reads it, really.  Occasionally people will mention it, and it feels great...to know people take the time to read what I have to say.  So for anyone who does, if you've been wondering about the title, here it is.  When I was in middle school, I went to a John Mayer concert with two friends and my parents in Philadelphia.  My dad was driving the car, and we parked in a parking garage near the venue.  Concert was great, and when we left, my dad handed the woman the ticket and the cash for the fare.  She saw the exit we were pointed to, and told my dad, "It's a one-way street out there - be careful if you turn around."  My friends and I joked about how metaphorical it was.  And you know what?  The words of that parking attendant always stick in the back of my mind.  Be careful when you turn around...but don't be too careful, or you'll be stuck in the garage.