Since the summer, I've had a grand time on the whole up until this last month or so. I've been blithely rolling about with no hopeless lovelorn look in my eyes; I'm social, I'm busy, I'm studying hard, I'm learning a lot, I'm having minor spurts of worry about next semester, I'm not talking to my mother, I'm staying on campus until Christmas...
Oh, yes, and then life began to suck in late November.
I was hit with the realization that graduation was going to be something attained with a degree of difficulty. There was the matter of money to be considered. I'm still working on that.
Then there was the building of family worries: I am reacting to the irresponsible brother/miscreant, mother's emotional state (which is like that of a melting piece of candy on a car seat), my grandmother's failing health, the apparent abandonment by my father and stepmother (not like that was anything new, but the silence was increased, and deafening), the sister overseas. Family tensions run high every time I'm at home, and I don't usually look forward to going back. There's something about a miserably cold and ill-cleaned house, the miasma of depression that has afflicted the clan since before I was born, and the self-protective callous front put on by the members of the family that makes the environment in which I exist during the holiday a cheerless one.
Staying at school isn't so nice all the time, either. Eventually the thought creeps along that I am lonely; this is squished when I think of my romantic track record. Was my happiness borne of the environment of a series of good stages of friendship, or of being free of feeling for any particular male? Was it because I was trusted, trusting, mostly unstressed, beloved, altrustically motivated, ethically grounded, tolerant, meek, obedient, kind cheerful thrifty brave clean irreverent not at home? I was beginning to think I was attracted to someone who was already spoken for; I wasn't about to do anything about that, so I cast my eye about otherwise far and wide, spoke like a middle schooler. It was great. But after a time the charms of that emptiness wore thin. A hypothesis that because nobody cared enough to ask about my problems that nobody cared was causing me trouble, as the accumulation of empirical data wasn't shifting the paradigm, only confirming it. I hate people who complain too much. They don't know what real problems are. Stupid existence.
Okay, so now I am getting all cathardic and stuff. The family situation is being supervised this month with my finally being at home; perhaps after the first few days things won't be so difficult. I hate crying. And perhaps everything will be different at school during my last semester of college--granted I get to come back, that is. After I confront the problems which will probably effect most of the rest of my life, I will come back to the spoiled playground of college and try to remember that life is neither perfect nor fair, especially in southern Kentucky.
"C'est tellement mystérieux, le pays des larmes."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince