About two months ago, I was talking to a few friends. One said she was afraid of the fact that she and a close guy friend had romantic feelings for each other because she was afraid of ruining their friendship, and even though it sounds corny, she can't imagine not having him in her life.
I told her that I hate that reason for not giving it a shot because 1) If it doesn't work out, you truly can still be friends if you BOTH want it enough, and 2) There are people that we think we can't live without. And then something happens and we find out, we can live without them. Life goes on.
I fully believe that.
I do, however, also believe in something I wrote four months ago:
You never really "get over" losing someone you love. You just learn how to accept it and turn it into something else. And if you loved them, you never really lose them, because they've had an impact on you--they've made a difference in your life and it's a part of you. The pain just mellows out.
It's funny. I was thinking before about the day in Venice when we went to the Universita Ca' Foscari and heard Kathy's friend Shaul lecture about the Venetian ghetto and The Merchant of Venice. After that, we took the vaporetto up from Dorsoduro to Cannaregio and had lunch in a cafeteria and then walked down to the old apartments that used to constitute the ghetto. During lunch, I somehow got to talking to Kathy about "intellectual alienation," as she called it, and we continued talking about it the rest of the day. I don't even really remember what we said, but I do remember that she emphasized to me: the struggle never ends.
I remember exclaiming to her that that was terribly depressing to hear. She shrugged, and told me very earnestly that it's true: she's been struggling with it her whole life, and even now, she still does.
She told me that nearly one year ago, to the day. In the past year, I've found myself oscillating between contentment and hopefulness, and despair and frustration, fairly evenly. When I came back from Venice, I was still pretty high. By July/August, I was falling hard and fast. September, I started getting better again. Pretty mellow for the most part, aside from some moments, through the fall. Winter break I went nuts, and it was even worse when I got back. I started looking up in March, and after Relay, I was pretty content all through April, though tormented by other things. Now I'm back home and frustrated and angry and feeling this dull ache all the time again. I'm trying to embrace it and channel it toward something productive, but sort of failing so far.
In a strange way, this past semester has kind of mimicked the second half of my junior year of high school. All of that year was pretty great, but the second half was just so crammed full of new friends, old friends, adjusted relationships, and crazy emotions, that the first two and a half years of high school are barely memorable by comparison. I can distinctly recall vivid, isolated incidences from those six months, while the two and a half years before that seem like a blur. That's how I feel about this past semester--as though I have lived more in the past five months than I did the two and a half years before that.
I wrote in my journal a lot at the end of junior year. I journaled a lot this semester. Mmm.
Well, I just hope senior year of college is a lot better than senior year of high school. Well...less painful. I don't know if I could go through that again. Although, isn't that what life is--fearing pain, taking a chance and living anyway, getting the shit kicked out of you, and then finding the strength to get back up again?
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