Transience

I feel like a visitor to my own life.

Nothing is orderly about my existence here. I'm taking a sojourn in bizzaro world where true life plans don't figure. Everything I do here resembles a game more than real life, and I suppose that's in large part because I'm doing it in a different language. Everything I wish to express - everything I'm so capable of expressing in my rich native tongue - comes out in rude form. Often I have to be direct. I always fancied myself a direct person, but in being forcibly bereft of all my qualifying phrases, ego massaging modifiers, and neutral idioms, I've discovered just how marvellously reliant I've been on our distinctly American form of equivocation. I don't have fine control over the revealed intent of my sentences. The directness and the partial saying of things and especially the omitting of sentences and description therefore lends a surrealism to everything I do. At root it's still me, but I often feel as though it's only a rough sketch. Sometimes I like the sketch me better.

I still feel most like myself when I'm with Don Julio. However, we've recently had a series of conversations that have left me floating and unsure of my place. We've been discussing how one decides one's future, and what each of us are interested in doing during that mighty stretch of years left to us. We talk as though we're two friends whose lives have just happened to converge for an instant, or some lucky series of instants. Of course, that is the essential classification of our relationship. How else can we speak about our lives except as two separate entities? When I think about that, I start confronting the temporary nature of my time here, which leaves me even more detached, and in difficult moments, empty.

I should just take his advice. 'You can't spend your time here thinking and planning what you're going to do afterwards. You have to take advantage of the experiences being offered to you here.' Up until very recently, thanks to him, I've been doing that - I've living in the moment. It's been awesome. And now, thanks to him, I can't stop thinking about 'What next?' This is coming with the realization that I need to be honest with him about a few things I wanted to avoid. Divulging those things would make what I have with him more concrete than I'd envisioned and I don't know how to interpret that kind of realism in this unreal scenario. It means I have to ask what the hell I'm doing here with him and why I'm investing something in this temporary world. It means I can't stop wondering about what he thinks he's doing.

There must be a way to turn off that part of me that poisons my life with pointless questions and complications. It always ends up making me sad, where I should be grateful.

God, if only some asshole on my floor hadn't eaten all my chocolate pudding cups. I could really use one right about now.