December 2006
It’s always windy in Philadelphia. Even though the temperature’s been as high as sixty this month, the wind is still harsh enough to bite ears. Walking through these city streets, the discarded, naked Christmas trees lining the pavement make me realize how quickly time passes and how easy it is to just miss something, like a bus or a train, like a birthday or short visit from an old friend who lives far away now. Or maybe this is all just me.
When you grow up thinking you could have been the second coming of Christ, if only you weren’t a half hour too late, if Mary didn’t need the epidural, you notice yourself coming short of all sorts of things. Like finally finishing college after never having the time to witness your head spinning throughout the semester, only to realize at the end of it, when it’s too late, you’re one one-hundredth short of the only goal you set.
December. After the long, hard year, when the cold begins to make everyone weary, they migrate back to their homes. From so far from it, the memory of home is like a fireplace—the only thing that can warm the heart from the stinging breaths of cold air. After finishing finals, I felt no real sense of accomplishment, as one might think I would, I just felt cold. My nose was cold. My toes were cold. On that last stroll through the mostly empty campus, I noticed the leaves still strewn atop the brick pathways, immediately sepia-toned as a memory. A fireplace. Something to yearn for that you can never really have back. Homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. The people you hang out with won’t even be around two weeks. Fleeting.
So quickly it is that the world you call your own can change, flip and flop, upside-down and then right back to that old same shit. Different day. December.
I had to work on New Years Eve this year. No Times Square Dick Clark Countdown. No chaotic, drunken banging on pots. I don’t like resolutions—I don’t like the idea that things in my life need to be evaluated and inspected and resolved. I’m only 23. I just turned 23.
By Nicole
When you grow up thinking you could have been the second coming of Christ, if only you weren’t a half hour too late, if Mary didn’t need the epidural, you notice yourself coming short of all sorts of things. Like finally finishing college after never having the time to witness your head spinning throughout the semester, only to realize at the end of it, when it’s too late, you’re one one-hundredth short of the only goal you set.
December. After the long, hard year, when the cold begins to make everyone weary, they migrate back to their homes. From so far from it, the memory of home is like a fireplace—the only thing that can warm the heart from the stinging breaths of cold air. After finishing finals, I felt no real sense of accomplishment, as one might think I would, I just felt cold. My nose was cold. My toes were cold. On that last stroll through the mostly empty campus, I noticed the leaves still strewn atop the brick pathways, immediately sepia-toned as a memory. A fireplace. Something to yearn for that you can never really have back. Homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. The people you hang out with won’t even be around two weeks. Fleeting.
So quickly it is that the world you call your own can change, flip and flop, upside-down and then right back to that old same shit. Different day. December.
I had to work on New Years Eve this year. No Times Square Dick Clark Countdown. No chaotic, drunken banging on pots. I don’t like resolutions—I don’t like the idea that things in my life need to be evaluated and inspected and resolved. I’m only 23. I just turned 23.
By Nicole
posted by Joey at 6:24 PM
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