The Flossy Flossy
Keeping it “on the real” the best I can.Archive for May 29, 2009
Solitudine
The new question these days is, “When are you leaving? Are you looking forward to leaving?” I’m always at a loss for words when people ask me that. Am I looking forward to leaving? Yes, I’m looking forward for school to end; I’m looking forward to not having to sit alone in a classroom at lunchtime twiddling with my iPod. I so look forward to having a long, intimate chat with someone I care about and someone who reciprocates my feelings. I’m looking forward to feeling welcomed again. So yes, I am looking forward to getting out of Horten.
But how I am here, I can’t really lie to myself. I’ve roundabouted. I had high hopes in coming here, to make great friends with the Norwegians, to establish myself and immerse myself in their world. I wanted to fit in. But now I realize that the life I had created for myself here is not different than the one I wanted to flee from last year, give or take a few extraneous factors. I try not to have the same expectations for Switzerland; I can’t be quite sure that I won’t.
And perhaps this is it. Perhaps I’m not so much disappointed with this experience as I am with the realization that no matter what city, country, continent I find myself on, I can’t escape the loneliness of my own existence. I guess that’s the most upsetting thing.
I said I could never understand those people who want to live in the same city they grew up in; I think I do now. It’s a blissful life that I can never lead, because the only time I feel truly at ease is when I’m moving.
An Ounce of Cure
I was reading a piece by Alice Munro for my Internasjonal Engelsk class when I came upon this passage. God, she puts it more eloquently than I ever could. That night was the beginning of months of real, if more or less self-inflicted, misery for me. Why is it a temptation to refer to this sort of thing lightly, with irony, with amazement even, at finding oneself involved with such preposterous motions in the past? That is what we are apt to do, speaking of love; with adolescent love, of course, it’s practically obligatory; you would think we sat around, dull afternoons, amusing ourselves with these tidbit recollections of pain. But it really doesn’t make me feel very gay — worse still, it doesn’t really surprise me — to remember all the stupid, sad, half-ashamed things I did, that people in love always do. I hung around the places where he might be seen, and then pretended not to see him; I made absurdly roundabout approaches, in conversation, to the bitter pleasure of casually mentioning his name. I daydreamed endlessly; in fact if you want to put it mathematically, I spent perhaps ten times as many hours thinking about Martin Collingwood — yes, pining and weeping for him — as I ever spent with him; the idea of him dominated my mind relentlessly and, after a while, against my will. For if at first I had dramatized my feelings, the time came when I would have been glad to escape them; my well-worn daydreams had become depressing and not even temporarily consoling…. It’s fiction, but it has all been lived before. There should be a club for people like us. Or a Facebook group.









