Canadia

        Eep! Now that was a frighteningly long stretch of time to go without a single blog post. I do, however, have a legitimate excuse. I was stuck in the Canadian Rockies, mostly in Banff National Park. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was pretty and all, but I think I had enough after about one day. Nine days was a bit excessive, seeing as all there is are mountains and water and a few animals. We hiked around 4 gigantic lakes and each one pretty much was the same. This has reinforced my notion that I absolutely cannot go to a college that is not close to an urban center. I had enough of nature to last me a lifetime. I really do feel like an ungrateful spoiled priss, especially knowing that this was likely to be my last family vacation and my parents spent a lot of money and effort on it. It really didn't help that I'm going to China in about a week to teach American culture to Chinese students or whatever and I still need to finish my lesson plans and I really need to work on my college essays. This vacation felt kind of like a waste of time, and each day I fall into more despair with the whole crazy mother situation. I'll post more about that later. I'm just kind of pooped even though I haven't been doing much of anything at all. I'm not excited for anything. 
-T.

 P.S. - a likely painting prospect

i lost this friend.

Ever calm, ever cool,  
The evening breeze
Changed course.
Approach or question didn't dare.
I don't dare.
-T.

i lost a friend.

        I guess this really isn't anything new. It's not new in the sense that he's been lost for quite a while, and it's not new in the sense that people lose friends all the time. I am still in the process of accepting my latest loss. Near the end of my relationship with D, I asked ZJ if he would still be my friend if we broke up. His response: "Yes. You know, if I didn't want to be friends with you I could have done that a long time ago." At a point when I needed to hear them most, these were some of the most comforting words of my life.
        There is no good reason that we are not friends anymore, other than that I screwed up and pushed him away. While I did that, I guess I never really believed that I would need him again, or maybe I never really believed that he would actually leave me for good. Either way, it doesn't matter anymore. What's lost is lost. He won't speak to me. In person if I approach him he will acknowledge me, but he has told people that I seem to give him this big fake smile whenever I see him. I try to chat him up on skype, but he just ignores me. I don't know what's happening anymore. I cannot even speak to him about this. EG's existence doesn't help at all either. Our schism is simply stuck, and I suppose I did it to myself. I have no choice in the matter now.
        Losing a friend is kind of like a breakup, but I really do think it is worse. Maybe you weren't so deeply and emotionally intertwined with a friend, but it is still a heartbreak all the same. It's worse because friends are not supposed to leave you. Boyfriends come and go. They are supposed to, especially at my age. I knew in the back of my mind all along that D would leave me and that he would cut me ever so deeply. That's just how the vast majority of relationships end up. On the contrary, friendship is supposed to last past all of these hot romantic relationships. Friendship goes deeper. There is no need to say sweet nothings to your friends because they know them already and you aren't really afraid to lose them. A great friendship should be stable and comforting.
        ZJ was more than just a friend to me. He was the brother I never had. I really looked up to him. His grades weren't that great and he wasn't that good looking, but he knew what was important in life. He knew the right things to say and everyone loved him. He always got his point across, and his messages were concise and insightful. While my mind frantically tried to find comfort in a state of perpetual confusion, he was a voice of reason. Later his role came to be fulfilled even better by LE, but that didn't make me value ZJ less. As of last year, and even the beginning of this school year, ZJ was the only person from high school who I just knew I would keep in contact with. We were supposed to invite each other to dinner parties and have our kids over for play dates and have every Christmas and Thanksgiving together and laugh about all the silly things we did when we were teenagers. I couldn't, and I still can't, say that about anyone else. I looked up to him, my big brother who I was afraid of sometimes, who I would be annoying to much of the time. Now he won't look at me at all.
-T.

Anatomy of a Kiss

"He asked if he could kiss me when he heard I'd never had the experience.  I asked him why.  He'd also heard I had no interest in it.  He leaned closer to me, trapping my eyes with his, and said he'd be honored to be my first. 

Someone has to be my first, a voice whispered in my head.   Why not him?  It wasn't like he was just anybody, after all.   It was him, and he had always been special.  He was being special right now in the way he was in my space, in the way he had me transfixed, in the way my breath had changed to something more swift and shallow.  He was being special in the way he was closing the distance between us, and I was ready to voice my objections -- how dare he presume my answer to be yes? -- when something in my mind decided to inform me smugly that I had already nodded my head in affirmation. 

When had that happened?  It hardly mattered.  It had, so nothing to do but go with it.  I'd never done this before, but logic told me that if he had his lips parted slightly, then maybe I ought to part mine as well.  His eyes flicked over the features of my face, and I found myself echoing the action, tracing the smooth line of his jaw, noting each faint freckle across the bridge of his nose, falling into his deep, soft eyes.

What was a kiss, really?  I'd never been interested in pressing my lips to another's.  The idea didn't discomfit me, so I had allowed this, but I had worried if my head would be disengaged from the action.  Not in that I feared my heart would take over, but in that my head would impatiently observe the proceedings, thinking, 'Whoopee.  Are we finished yet?  I've got other things to do.'

I was wrong.  I was so very wrong.  At that moment, there was nothing else I would rather have been doing.  A kiss was more than just brushing lips with another.  I hadn't accounted for the way he filled my personal space, bringing a feeling of intimacy from the utter rarity that I would let anyone so close, and not just to my mouth.  We weren't touching, but I could feel him as an almost tangible presence from my shoulders all the way down to my shins.   I hadn't expected that I would feel his warm breath sliding gently across my skin, that in breathing we would be sharing our air.   Logically, his fingers were probably cooler than the skin of my cheek, but it seemed they sent a tingle of heat through me and down my spine.

My lips became suddenly sensitized.  They didn't respond in any remarkable way when I ate, drank, brushed my teeth, but now, now they felt the kiss before it even came.  Actual contact was just that much more.  They were just lips, but I became acutely aware of the person behind them.  We no longer shared breath, but everything we had between us, powerful enough that it left no room for air.   Our parted mouths lingered in quiet, innocent communion before his puckered closed, bringing mine with his to the accompaniment of a soft, moist sound that struck some deep, instinctive chord within me.   Cool, empty air once again intruded between us.  My lips parted again immediately thereafter as if to rewind, the abandonment creating a sudden vacuum I was pulled forth to fill, but alas, my first kiss had technically come to an end.

It didn't feel like it.  As bereft as I felt with the loss of his lips against mine, I still felt him.  His fingers slid slowly off my cheek, and though that decreased the sensation, it took its sweet time in fading away completely.  It was like a string stretching between us, growing thinner as the distance grew until it finally lost its cohesive tension despite all its efforts.

My timesense told me only a few seconds had passed.  How was that possible?  There was a lot more to this whole kissing thing than I'd thought if it had even the power of time dilation.   I'd already been proven wrong in finding that it was more than just a brushing of lips; it was a full body affair.

He smiled as he pulled away.  I found one of my hands had risen to touch his hip during the experience.  Excellent.   There was less ground for it to cover now as I commanded it to slide up and snag his shirt.  Halted in his departure, his expression was just sliding into a question when I informed him breathlessly that I would be so very honored if he were to be my second, as well.

And I continued to be honored as he graced me with my next, my last, and every one in between."

[http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~jchew/misc/anatomy.html]

last day of school

        Yep, that was today. It was nice, I just made ice cream in my calculus class for the final, and then I had an open so my friends and I went to Jewel and gorged ourselves with chicken. I couldn't have asked for a better last day of school. 
        With the end of one comes the start of another. Some people are considering me to be a senior now, and it's really pretty scary. I have always had a sort of Peter Pan complex, but here it's much more conflicted. After all that I have learned and created of myself in the past school year, I feel as if I want to be treated as an adult and put my new knowledge out there. Yet, I don't know if I am ready to act like an adult. I don't know if I am ready to face all these adult issues. I am afraid of the adult I will become. Some adults lead sad, annoying, and tedious lives.What will be will be, and right now I just have to focus on being the best me I can be.
        The hardest part of all this is going to be letting go of everything that has shaped me and everything that I know. I feel like I need to do all these crazy things before it's too late, then another part of me feels like I need to just live my life normally so that I can feel normal, whatever that is. Every parent dreams of greatness for his or her child. Every child dreams of doing something huge and changing the world. When we are young, there is so much hope for the future, there are so many paths and so many possibilities. When we grow older, some of us will certainly be more successful than others. Some of us will look back on our lives with satisfaction, others with distaste and remorse. We can't know which ones we will become, because no matter what we dream, all of us dream. We're not going to get all of our dreams. I suppose I am afraid of dreaming the wrong dream and choosing a wrong path. Once that path is taken, we can't turn time around and choose another. I'm seeing the importance of dabbling in everything and taking the time to really find out what we want to do for the rest of our lives. After all, we need to spend our lives having a good time, or else why would we live at all?
-T.