as you struggle to hold on to feelings they slip and slide like ice cubes, like olives chased with a toothpick, life fish in shallow sea water, and you cannot firm them up, know that you have them. or you know them, but only intellectually. you know that you love, that you don’t hate, but your heart feels this love like a melting ice cube you try to capture with a fork before it’s gone. time bomb baby. i know that my feelings grow and inflate like madly whipped cream and are just as easily deflated. i know that my mind deflates them bc it can’t bear the excitement. love and happiness are way more intolerable to my mind than pain and sadness. i do not think this is rare. i think this is common. people take refuge is states of diminishment because thriving, being genuinely happy, is simply intolerable to them. 

so, tonight, i felt i hated S. i love S. i know that i love S. but i felt as if i hated him. i felt so angry. i wanted him to stop dragging himself around the house like a sad sack of sorrows. mild annoyance got quickly whipped into white hatred.

and i felt scared of my girlfriend, and sometimes, ridiculously, when i feel this scared, i want all of this to go away, this budding relationship, this lovely, lovely thing. i prefer gray. i prefer no sky. 

and maybe my anger at S and my fear of J are bound inextricably, because how can i walk away from the gentle, loving, survival-enabling chains of my rapport with S toward the clear blue sky of my rapport with J without looking at the chains that killed my lifejoy for 25 years and raging at them?

and how can i walk toward this blue sky, so unprecedented, so unlikely, and not feel tremendous nostalgia for the chains that are now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, the life i know, the life that moored me and kept me from spilling over uncontrollably into emptiness? the life in which i got my ph.d., taught fabulous classes, formed valuable relationships, had moments of joy, had moments of comfort, felt sometime peace. how can i not have terrible mixed feelings about all this.

i need quiet. i need to find calm. but calm seems to put a damper on love. i need calm to rest and function, and calm is absolutely inconsistent with this upheaval of madly whipped feelings.

today i said this to J, this thing about my need to put a damper on feelings, and how sad it is that i may need to be numb when i visit her. this numbness terrifies me too, by the way. because what if i lose her, inside me and inside her? and then i told myself, and her: i will be more alive the next time.

I finally accepted my admission to UOttawa International Development and Globalization.

I don't think my mom is very happy that I'm leaving but Ottawa is definitely the school for me. I'll be sad to leave all the great ties I made at UWaterloo behind though.

Now I have to study for my French immersion test. People keep telling me it's not so bad but I haven't done a lick of French since the end of last year - eugh.

Also, I need to get on those scholarships.