On Future Days

My friends will do things in their lives.

Not startling, but startling.

Since going to an arts school, I've bumped into faces I know in Health magazine, in popular YouTube videos, NYTimes slideshows, and the program of a national touring company, all of which brings home quickly this idea of doing things and being known. It's easily recognizable when your friends are performers with pictures plastered up, and I don't doubt that many of the kids I know at Williams and elsewhere will go to have prominent actor bios and book-jacket covers. But other ways equally important, it'd be harder to notice or remember; realizing that the guy I know simply as an alum and friend's boyfriend does something, and that something is work in the White House. Or at a bank, or that he's doing research on birds with an ornithology lab (or will be married this summer, 2 years after college). The point is, these people are no longer being graded - yes, evaluated, yes, dependent, but no, they do not have 3 papers, 2 applications and 1 exam this week. At one point they did. But if I keep all these friends in my remembrance as doers of school and not people who are working towards being people, I will burrow in here and miss the point of it.

I'm getting scared of things again, which always happens when there's too little time to breath. At the end of Winter Study, I felt comfortable and confident and true in a way I hadn't felt at college before and have been slowly slipping from ever since. Why so elusive, always, I wonder? I need a river under the bright moments and the bad, instead of these little falls at gladness and dry rock everywhere else. Sometimes the high points are the deceptive bits -- the giddiness you feel causes thoughtlessness, while gravity makes you kinder. I hope to know the difference.