UWC LAMPOON

What if you don’t fee like caring anymore?

if I were to give up, who would really care?

my roomies?

friends?

Leila?

Rene?

…Pandie?

I cannot say that I have lost faith,

I still very well know why I came here,

I still know what I want to do

the ideal me lures up in the distance,

unreachable, chatting happily with everyone else

smiling, but not only smiling, but smiling for a reason

simply having a reason to smile

Giving up is too easy

It is difficult to decide whether I am miserable

or whether it is just that I am finally content with the way I really am

a miserable and pitiful blob of booger

not having the courage to speak up,

finding it difficult to find the need to rise out of bed

only to repeat the same mistakes again

only to be ever more miserable, and shy and disgusting and odd

and repulsive

I have come to accept all of this

I do not want it, but I do not fight against it

maybe it is not my role to shine in the world

maybe it is my duty to crawl in the muddy puddles of life

miserably clinging from one day to another not knowing where to go

yet still knowing it very well

hating yourself and pitying the very image you have in mind

just wanting to let go

wanting to not to care

to cradle in misery

being content with being me

~~~

I look around as we sit in the student center that looks like the garage of a high school rock band and 

I’m in awe.

The beautiful people that surround me with all their quirks and smiles and habits and clothes and countries. I will never find them anywhere else.

The blood moon is out and we all crowd the steps to the castle to gaze at it. This eclipse won’t happen again for months, perhaps years. This joy of being with the people that have loved me the most in a place that has comforted me the most won’t happen again. For months. Perhaps years.

I think of the people that I love, all sprawled across the world like a net of stars tied together by a moon. That love doesn’t change, despite the swirling sky, the swirling tide, the swirling emotions, the swirling time. There’s a piece of me carved out for those people, a chunk of flesh that won’t heal.

I’m rejoicing in that scar.

I don’t understand why we’re all here, why we move around and do work and try to rush all the time. I know that we cling to each other like the syrup my roomie used to put in her tea and that’s all we know, all we can do. All the star dust laced in each person I’m now discovering, I can’t unsee it. I will never stop believing in the beauty of people, the beauty of my people.

I thank whatever universe or constellations or god or deity or force that brought me to this point of joy.

I’m in love with life.

~~~

No one to save me but a plastic heart,

no thing to heal me but a plastic lighter

as I recognize that demons gnash their

teeth when angels begin a chorus.

Watch the spiral and chaos of it all,

the harmonized decay of sincerity

as we all dodge each other and our

silly musings, thoughts not worth enough

the effort it takes to vocalize them.

See why I can’t love you? It’s too

much of her and me and you, too

much uncertainty to be reckless again.

The problem with possessing plastic

is that it scratches easily, breaks under

force and concrete, is too stiff to make up

a heart and too pliable to hold any pain.

~~~

When I first came to UWC, I never thought that it would be riddled with many of problems it is. The fact that students care about the UWC ethos or went through a “strenuous” selection process is negligible, when you notice problems that would simply not be tolerated in most other schools.

People getting so intoxicated that they can’t remember what they did or didn’t do the night before, a culture which is widely accepted, even encouraged in many circles. Moreover, the actions forgotten by many from the night before are quickly forgiven no matter how repulsive or categorically wrong they would seem in a different context. Instead feeble excuses are given, such as “he was drunk”, “she was drunk”, or “he was never like that with me”. Even though these arguments are transparent, people still separate the drunken harasser with the amicable guy as if they are two different people.

It is this attitude of dissociation, in which campus habitually fails. If there is a problem with a person, people too frequently discard it, seeing only the aggressor’s respective place in the social hierarchy. People here are selfish. They only care about how a single event affects them; if it doesn’t change their interactions with the person they don’t give a fucking shit. In this way, those who still worship the ground a second year stands on, just for a mild piece of attention or appreciation are nearly bad as the original villain.

Student’s inebriated actions are discounted because they were drunk, or at the most forgiven after a facebook message or small token of food. Taking advantage of people is accepted due to someone having a “hard summer” or “missing their second years”. Drunken confessions are negated by a morning apology and a shite, clichéd excuse.

Yet when we had all those meetings last year, about which we all loved to complain, the bullshit would just flow like a TOK lesson.

“Any type of assault will not be tolerated”

“If you see something you must report it”

Information rejected due to our arrogance in the benevolence of our community. What fucking community. A community, in which we endorse those who are popular despite the abhorrence of their behaviour. If this has happened so early in the year, how many cases of “they were both drunk” had a similar hidden malice last year? Probably Many, too many.

It is this very community that tolerates things like this to happen. The attitude “he was never like that with me” should never be acceptable, and is blind and weak. Yet I’m sure we will hear the arguments of “he was drunk” or “she was drunk” repeated time and time again, well past the end of my two years at UWC. All too often people sacrifice their true beliefs to be socially accepted or seen as cool. We were chosen because we were supposed to be better than this.

I shall name this because I don’t care what he thinks of me.

~~~

                                           sharing the same sky

                                        meant something to me,

                               two souls together in a sweet reality

                            yet the sun and moon can only pass by,

                         now we are gazing at different constellations

                             and admiring opposing light gradations

                                       and sharing the same sky

                                           not like we used to,

Tell me about Duino. No do not tell me about the friends you made, the memories you shall never forget, or even the lessons you learned.  I have heard those stories before, no tell me about Duino. The village that the Austrian tourists come to see, as they nearly walk into mensa asking where “REELIKAY” is. Tell me about the village that for some reason more cyclists pass through than cars. Tell me stories of the wind that sweeps through the streets even when there is no idealistic student to feel it. Why do you look so uncomfortable?  Because there is no distinguishing the two. It was the village were Boltzmann hanged himself, but it was where I learned that fact from my physics teacher who clicked his teeth louder than he spoke. It is a place where Dante wrote part of his epic, but also a place where I was moved by the words you have scribbled in your little notebook. It is the place where the signs are in Slovene and Italian, yet the languages I heard and learned stretched further than one could imagine. There is a castle, a bar, a pizzeria, it has all of those things, but so do many places. Although, my UWC experience didn’t happen in any other place.

I danced in Mickeys and lost myself in the music while you held me. I spoke to you for the first time in the back of an osmica and we fell into an intense love. I found you having a smoke in the abandoned hotel escaping the rain, I sat with you to wait out the storm, but our conversation lasted hours after the sound of lightning ceased. You discovered me on the rocks of porto overlooking the sea with tears in my eyes. You sat next to me and listened to my fears without judgment, and even bought me a gelato to make me feel better. We strolled through rilke late at night, trying to be quiet so Stephen wouldn’t hear us, but the harder we tried, the louder our laughs echoed through the trees. You told me your dreams on the beach of cernizza, the cracking fire reflecting in your eyes and illuminating your beauty. You laid in my arms as we stared in silence at the stars in Carso.

You want to know about Duino? I cannot help you. There is no objectivity with that small village outside of Trieste to me anymore. Duino cannot exist in my mind without the faces of the people I experienced it with; although, I also cannot think of the people I love without thinking of the village where we feel in love. 

~~~

Necessary background knowledge: I go to college in the same city I lived in until I was five. It has this sign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z39E5JoimVk

The sign inhales, red lights spreading. Mesmerized, I turn my head to follow it, disappearing and reappearing from behind dark buildings. I am nearly sleeping, my head leaning against the edge of my carseat There are memories I didn’t know I still had This city kept them for me - tucked away on that strip of highway for 15 years I found one on the bus to a club yesterday - the breathing red sign

And it wasn’t just that I remembered her. For a moment, with that same engulfing, calm rhythm, that slow turn of my head, I was her

for a moment yesterday I was five years old and tomorrow I will be four times as old as she was - and lonely

It’s almost funny to me -  I had one home back then - right along that strip of highway, dreaming beside the huge red sign and now I have so many I lay down and wonder which pair of arms I wish would wrap around me and this place - undecorated dorm room and taunting sleepless nights,  a few minutes’ evening drive from the lulling red lights - is cold and barren and yearning for something far away

~~~