Taking a break from Twilight tonight. It’s raining in Morris tonight, a soft gentle rain. And I just saw who I think was one of my friends out in it, holding up her pants, walking barefoot, soaking it up. It’s a quiet night after a meeting with next years apartments staff, a night for, I think, reflection. My time here in Morris as a student is coming to an end, but with the maddening pace of the end of the year (research paper, research presentation, Residential Life logistics) I feel like I’ve been skimming the surface off the the experience of my final days without letting it soak in, like my friend outside let the rain soak in. I sat out on the mall today with my laptop and read through the most recent draft of my research paper, and in between pages I just looked up and watched. A group was laying out in the grass, eyes closed, soaking in that sun. The weather’s getting nicer, inversely proportional to my apparent work ethic and creative drive. The research paper is not a mess, but it’s a ways from good. That’s my task tomorrow, clean that up. Tonight I’m going to work on The Beacon, and try to work toward understanding the main crux of the whole story: that a woman had a child, and then, for reasons yet unknown, faked her own death, and adopted her biological child under an assumed name. Why did she do that? I have no idea yet, but I know that she did it. She hid herself under a secret identity, but didn’t want her child, her son, to have his taken away. She did this out of love, because she couldn’t stand to be parted from her child, but, for some reason, she also could not stand to remain the person she had been. That old person had to die, had to be done away with. Her story is the center of the story, the black hole around which the galaxy of fiction spirals. But trying to get to the center of a black hole and see what’s inside is hard, impossible perhaps, but it’s a story that I have to know because it’s the reason for the rest of the story. Morris is lovely in the spring, with the wind shaking trees like slow maracas, flowers peeking up, the world is brighter, is better to live in, and it makes me not want to leave. Morris is the center of my story, the people I know, the friends I’ve made, the choices I’ve made, the love I have, all of it rotates, spirals, around this little town in the middle of somewhere. It’s a place I’ve grown into, a place I’ve set down emotional roots, it’s my home for now but not my home for ever. A friend told me that the way things work is we’ll all move on and grow into the next place and make that home, but that doesn’t ease the transplantation. But I understand and feel that my time here is drawing down to a point on the horizon; I’ve done what I came to do, and I’ve done it the best I could and now it’s time for what comes next. And what comes next is a year away, a year to center myself, to gorge myself on good books and good video games and good friends from years ago, a time to prepare to take the next stride, to find another place to put down roots, another place to call home. But all of that wishing and hoping and looking ahead subsumes the beautiful immediacy of the now, and now is where I want to be, now is what I want to do, I want to sit here in the dark looking out the window, feeling the rain-chilled air seep in through the window and watch the pools of reflected light shatter and reform with drops of rain. I want to soak in this place, draw it deep into myself, and hold a bit of it there to cherish later, to remember, to love. This place has been home, and soon it won’t be. It won’t be my home anymore, but people I love will still be here, people I will miss and visit often, but I never want to forget the time we’ve had here, together, under the same sky, soaking this place into ourselves, nourished equally by the sun and the laughs and the rain. When I am gone, I’ll carry this with me, a lasting and immortal breath of chilled spring evening air, coming off the grass that grows under the sky, and under that sky is us, will always be us.

Generally, I don’t like Halloween.  I don’t dislike it, I just tend to let it slide by without much notice.  As a kid, I remember loving it simply for the fact that it was the one day of the year that it was acceptable to toss my parents usual rule of “don’t talk to strangers” out the window and walk around in the dark trolling for sweets.  Now, I don’t know.  Maybe it’s the flippant mockery of fear.  On one hand, I understand that Halloween is for many a time when they can put up these comic depictions of everything that scare us, because one of the best ways to conquer a fear is to find a way to laugh at it.  I just tend to think that horror represents something more than big, bloated witches and shambling, dumb mummies.  There is a difference between conquering or facing a fear, and reducing our fears to something ridiculous.  I don’t know where I’m going with this, and it probably warrants further thinking, but, yea, Halloween usually is a source of annoyance rather than enjoyment.

However, two awesome things did happen.  One of them is documented here.  Two guys from my school, we’ll call them C and S, staged and elaborate Pokemon battle on the campus mall, complete with battle music, pokeballs, and pokemon in full costume.  I was very glad that this happened, and it made me love my school all over again.  I’m hoping it will be posted to YouTube soon, and if that happens I’ll link to it.

The other thing was, my partner and I were driving down to the cities this weekend, and wanted to grab some Chipotle.  Now, I’ve never been to Chipotle on Halloween, never knew Chipotle did anything special on Halloween, but when we walked in the line was almost out the door, and everyone was wearing aluminum foil.  Apparently if you wear foil you get a free burrito.  We didn’t have foil, but a couple gave us theirs when they were done, so we got free food.  Awesome.

Spent the weekend playing Arkham Horror, a fairly complex board game based on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.  It took us three hours to even get the basic concepts of the game down, but Saturday afternoon we played through and beat it.

Also, started reading Jeff Smith’s Bone on Friday.  I’ve only read the first book of it, the first 150 or so pages out of over a thousand, but I’m loving it so far.

It was a recharge weekend, a time to get away from everything that was going on.  Now tonight we’re driving back to Morris, and then the madness begins.

I’ve always had a pretty good memory when it comes to song melodies and lines from movies.  There was a stretch where my partner refused to watch certain movies with me because I would whisper along with every bit of dialogue.  For all three original Star Wars movies, I can talk along with the movie, nailing the lines and the rhythm and the delivery.  It drives some people up the wall.  The other consequence of that kind of culture memory is that I can recognize songs quickly.  Tonight at Open Mic, a guy played a few notes to start a song, and I barked, laughing without being able to help myself.  Some people looked at me funny, my partner got it, and after the next bar, people realized that he was sliding into a heartfelt, folky rendition of “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys.  How long has it been since I last heard that song?  Years?  Probably, but still, just from the first three notes, I remembered it.  It was like those first notes unlocked a closet of memory, because I mouthed along to the rest of the song, knowing all the words.

After they had been dating for awhile, Nic wanted to show her his favorite movie.  The film was something that had been weaved into the very fabric of his being, something he had watched more times than he could count as a child, something that had had a tremendous effect on the man that he turned into.  He knew every scene by heart, could mimic the tone and register of the dialogue exactly.  The movie meant to so much to him, and he couldn’t wait to share it with her.  When they sat down to watch it, he kept stealing glances at her, wanting to see how she reacted, but by the middle of the screening, he was in a terrible mood.  She wasn’t reacting to anything!  By the end, when he asked her if she had liked it, she responded with a genuine, but unimpressive, “Yes.”  And that was all she had to say.  There are things in our lives that we love for reasons only we understand, the things, music, films, pictures, carry very specific weight with us because we carried them across the landscape of our lives.  But when we set them down and show them off to others, that significance for them is invisible.  They are like trinkets in an old shop, and things unmistakably fine, but with little resonance; they have only our descriptions and stories for context.  Part of a successful relationship, he thought, was coming to terms with the idea that, while he should never stop sharing these parts of himself, it was setting himself up for disappointment hoping she would react to it as he would.  What he could do was share it with her, and tell her the story.  And that would be enough.  Just to share himself that way.