my fingers are smudged with the residue of markers that i have been collecting for at least a decade now. i've got that crying feeling... not so much that i'm going to cry but just a constant version of that tension that builds up behind your eyes and cheeks just before you do. i'm cleaning/packing and listening to orbital's halcyon & on & on on repeat. this song is never included in my list of favorites, but i truly think it is the greatest thing ever created. EVER.

countdown t minus 13 days.

...*gulp*

don't get me wrong. i'm glad to be going. my big toe is excited. but my little toe is absolutely terrified. i really hate this kind of thing. i don't want to grow up.

oh, fuck, here i go.

i'm not ready for this. i know i'm probably just in some panic mode-stage-thing, but what if i'm right? i mean, how many people cry every consecutive night for three weeks before they are to depart for what is supposed to be one of the best experiences of their lives?

i cried on the last day of school every year. new years is more emotional than any holiday. i cried when 1989 was over because i had a shirt that had the year printed on the back and happy boardwalk food dancing on the front, and my dad made me throw it out when the year was over. i used to cry at the end of every pee-wee herman episode. i cried a couple weeks ago when i THREW OUT A PILLOW. in my defense, i'd had that pillow for a long time. i think if i was ever forced to throw out the raggedy ann doll i've had for seventeen years, i'd probably commit suicide.

i had this dream a few weeks ago. i'd run over my old bike with the truck and popped all the tires. i retold it to my brother and he told me to let go of the past and move the fuck on.

... *blink*

i don't know how.

okay, that's a lie. i have managed to move on from most things, but i certainly don't deal well with it. and now, it's not that i'm having seperation anxiety from the life i have here. i'm attached to the memories of what no longer exists.

and once i go and put sheets on that bed that's waiting for me in lake hall and name it mine, i have no choice but to admit to the fact that they are only memories. that it is in fact impossible to go back and do over. that life isn't like a song on repeat, where your impending disappointment of the song's near departure is quickly replaced by familiar notes and sounds and surprise, you're back in it again. and i think that maybe i've always harbored some innocent notion that it did. or maybe i just never accepted it.

i cannot be three years old again. i cannot go back to eighth grade. i cannot go back and right all the wrongs that i have so ridiculously commited.

deep down inside i know that just because i cannot go back and hear the same music again, it does not mean that i can't go forward and hear something similar, if not better. but right now i feel like a stuck record repeating the same ugly chord over and over again and you can hear the only discrepancy in the whole record, where the vocalist's voice cracks and wavers mid falsetto but at the time of production it was so little it was never corrected.

& i also know that this giant release of energy into words will backfire and only cause me to cry in greater amounts with each trash bag out the door, each taped box into the uhaul.

cause right now, i'm cracking and wavering and it feels like santa claus isn't real all over again.

the time is now 4:08 am. and sara's mood: crushed.