Keys

The weather is warm and I wonder how many bloggers have mentioned this obvious, mundane fact. Tomorrow is the last Kendo practice at Columbia I will attend, ever. I wish I had been more serious about it during these past few years, but I've been busy, though of late I just mismanage my time. Maybe three weeks ago my sensei saw me spar and said that when she went home she wanted to cry because she saw how beautiful some of my strikes were; I've still got a long way to go though. Whether it was her limited command in English or if she actually wanted to cry--I'm not sure. Somehow that signaled how much time had passed. Temporal markers in language are so different from emotive/spatial/experiential temporal markers. 'Then' is so simple, so concise. After. yesterday. That's not how I experience anything at all. I'm feeling the confinement of language.

It's odd when my studies so violently collide with the moments in my life. Perception. Time.

I'm tempted to write a letter to myself, cataloging the many regrets or memories I had at Columbia. I rather not.

Tea

Recovering from your linguistic grace--I'm jealous of your words and how they become so malleable and porous in your hands, yielding like warm wax to the little twitches that further define the striations of your wrists. Maybe it's something about the twilight hours that I am no longer privileged to, but that's my culpa. I've been hiding from them, indulging in somniferous realities instead. As of late, I have trouble differentiating certain fragments of dialogue have been volleyed from memories or dreams.

This lateral, horizontal mode of thinking of mine has been inhibiting my abilities. My attempts to find themes, tenuously linking one thought to another with an arsenal of thumb tacks and pieces of red, braided yarn. All that emerges is this mindless monochromatic web, this textile of text, a red hat, a red sweater.

You must already know, but the clicks wake me up, just as the tying of your shoes, the minute crackling of your fingers running through your thinly gelled hair, and the shuffling of the collection of free magazines, student publications and slips of paper with phone numbers seeking web designers or tutors in C that you stuff into your bag.

I only have a month left as an college student, and yet I will continue to be a student for, perhaps, the rest of my life. I wish I had something profound to say, as the study of Latin--a language pregnant with meaning from its own antiquity--should have bestowed on me when I graduated high school. Will I ask myself the same when I graduate med school?

As I walked through the gates to the Hispanic Society, I immediately noticed the large relief of Don Quixote. It wasn't how I imagined him, but I'm sure that's what he looked like: an old man, dehydrated by age, back rounded, ridiculously riding his horse in armor that was never his to wear. I must remind myself to visit another time. Effervescent is the wrong word, but certainly there was a magical quality that was too emotionally demanding for me to stay for long, some intangible that made the air heavy and poignant. The polychrome wooden saints, the tapestries that were simulacra of gilded frames (I always forget the term for this), oil paintings of Renaissance Hispana--they are reified history creating another history of their own. I can't...my words fail me...

Kaya

The temperature of this water will never reach the fervor of my heart, the leniency of its pulls and the accretion of honesty in its atrial valves.
Is it enough?
You asked me if you could touch the sky. And I sort of ignored you.
Some nights are more magical than others--blessed with the blisses of worn velvet couches, a thousand paper cranes flocking to find their way home--one having lost its way--and the clicks of spotlight tapped tongues.
Am I enough?
It's the kind of cold day where short skirts and kitten heels lose their aesthetic and where temperatures elide.
Why am I so angry?