Have you ever noticed? That when you have a cold, all sounds are amplified 10 x more than usual. I'm in a computer lab for Phonetics. The girl next to me is talking. We both went to the wrong classroom initially, so we rushed over to the library together, did the usual "Glad I'm not the only one, what's your major, My name's Kristen... blah blah" One of those loose connections that has everything to do with the location of your body and nothing to do with who both of you are, your interests, social status, musical taste... etcetera. It's kind of like bus conversations, when the driver runs up on a curb and you kind of look at the person to your left and you both shrug your shoulders together. Anyways. She's talking to me in a low voice, because she is a freshman and she hasn't yet learned that a class exercise means you can do just about anything with the alloted 15 minutes. But I can't hear her. She sounds like she is in a vortex. Somewhere incredibly far away speaking to me over a static ridden walky-talky. Instead I can hear the processors spinning in the computers on the other side of the room, and the ancient fans working quickly to cool off the great machines. I hear fingers on a thousand key boards, it's the loudest orchestra of unsynchronized musicians. Who are unaware of their presence in the musical piece. And the talking girl, her name is Kristen, She readjusts her pencil to transcribe the word penny as it is written on the board. And I hear them. The thin slivers of lead click and bang together in the plastic encasing. It's deafening. So I turn my attention to the computer. I check my e-mail, nothing. Then I check this blog. I read Rachel's last post and my vision starts to move in and out of focus. I turn around to look at the professor and the entire room appears to be a bright pink washed world. So I close the blog window and re-direct my gaze to my hands.
Overwhelming. I also noticed. That when I have a cold, I cannot dress myself properly. Like today, I look like someone who walked out of a 90's trash bin, awkward and mis-matched. ah well.
I feel good right now. Beyond my sickness, I feel this giant weight is relieved of my presence. I feel like I can do exactly as I please, that I an make decisions without concerning myself with who it will affect. I must only worry about myself. And this is huge for me. I have spent the majority of my life feeling the pains of others so deeply that I used to cry at night of pity. Pity for my friends and family. Not that they felt pity for themselves, but I felt it for them because I knew that they would not. It has been a long time since I have cried on another's behalf, outside of a commercial or film. But I still walked around with this kind of pressure. Pressure to care what my mother wants to do in her career. Pressure to care what new enclosure my father has built for the goats. Pressure to appear sane in front of my family, to appear put together and glued to my life's decisions. Pressure to pretend that I check my oil once every two weeks like my dad has been telling me since I got a car. Pressure to concern myself with the futures of my non-college- attending friends. Wishing and hoping and sometimes stooping to pray that they don't go back to Warsaw to work in a factory. But something changed. The moment I broke up with Sam, I feel like I woke up. I woke up buried in the bottom of a waste bin, and climbed out, and shed all of that pressure. And while I still care, I don't feel it. I don't feel it every time I take a weakened breath, every time I pour another cup of coffee.
And that feels great.
No comments:
Post a Comment