At the edges of the semester, I start to reminisce. A knee-jerk reaction, conditioned through the many times I’ve been forced to cut loose from something old and into something new, more than often unwillingly. Spending spots of time in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Georgia while growing up, times when my father’s job was unexpectedly taken away from him and forcing our family to bop around the country has a bit to do with my tendency to take temporal looks back and forth.
I tab pieces of time through the music I listen to, the people I meet at certain moments, the work I do, the things I read, the ebbs and flows I notice. These markers are there for convenience, but they are also framed by a strange neurosis - that at any moment, things could be taken away, that at any moment, things could be drastically different, that at any moment, things are no longer the same. Its as if the gargantuan processes of change that move the planets, that make our worlds work, were siphoning their energy specifically into me and my life, into my developing mind, my itty bitty heart. As if I was singled out to realize that things are always changing.
But then, I have always had a penchant for drama.
This might explain why I have this love-hate relationship with change. I often welcome it, and lately I realize I thrive off of it. But I have historically dreaded it.
Seeing as how my first semester of law school is coming to a quick end, I am looking back. And here’s what I realize: some people I’ve met I will know forever, some only for another few years; some ideas I’ve encountered will serve as the bedrock of my working life, some will be irreconcilable and plague me; some potential relationships will come to fruition, some will not; some conceptions about social justice I will latch onto, some I will discard; some simple things I will remember that I love, some I will not; sometimes I will cry, sometimes I will not; sometimes I will laugh, sometimes I will not; sometimes I will make someone else laugh, sometimes I will not; some people I will respect because of their politics, some I will respect because of the way they teach, some I will respect because of the way they act, some I will respect because of who they’re not, some I will respect because they need it, some I will respect because they’re just good people.
In other words, I haven’t seen much new or much old. Maybe its because change has its way of staying the same, and that it may be possible that I don’t dread it as much as I thought I did.
A penchant for drama and cheesiness! But that’s why we love u.
Left by JP on December 1st, 2006