Roma

I feel at home here in 1306 Lindell West, which doesn't make any sense when i think about it. I have been here less than 5 months and this is the room i have the least invested in of all the places i have ever lived. But for some reason, my innate sense of being home, the realization of current location as comfortable, i will have trouble leaving here in two days.

But right now i am sharing this home with joel, a man that just came back from studying abroad, who had rekindled my love and desire to talk about Rome. It has been in a large way diplomatic, as if i visited europe rather than lived there, loved there, lost there, tried my best there, and genuinely just let myself be there. When i think about rome i can't see individual people or specific places, but rather a collage of colors, feelings, images and imaginations. I remember inscribing the steam in my bathroom mirror with the words, "i want to go back" but that doesn't seem like the same mirror that i will see in several hours while brushing my teeth, attempting to prepare myself for another day of completely forgettable activities. It seems like the mirror i have had since day one, i forget a time before that mirror reflected who i was, and i had no other way of knowing what my incredibly long hair looked like.

My hair is a good metaphor for my remembrance of Rome, It is long, i remember a time when it was short, but not specifically. I remember exactly how long it looks every day i stare into that mirror, comb in one hand and the base of hair in the other, trying viciously to pull through the knots. I want to go back to short hair, but i dont know if i am ready for it, it has been so long since i have known anything else. It has been months since i understood a different way to live my life.

There is a feeling of; belonging, accomplishment, singularity, conjecture, humanity, abstractness, warmth, immediateness, comfort and a touch of forlorn that comes to mind when i try now to think about Roma. But my main fear is that i can no longer think of it at all, that what i have left is what anyone could cook up after an especially good nights dreams.

Forever Home

I am laying in my bed right now, Lindell West living. This bed is the most comfortable of all time, there is no bed that compares. If Kate Bekinsale wanted to go back to her hotel room after meeting me at a bar, i would at least try to convince her to come back here.

I know how long i have to make figure 8s in the lobby based on what floor the vator is on. I know that the back elevator is slow as hell, and when you come in the back way it is way easier just to take it, but right about floor 7 you wonder if you are doing to die in the slowest elevator of all times.

UPDATE 9/15: Finding this draft 4 1/2 months later has made me reflect on what the hell truly happened in 1306W. The fond memories i have do not come to mind first, but rather the soul crushing nights that happened instead. While smoking out the bathroom window while sitting on the edge of the tub when i was too cold or lazy to go out to the porch is a good story, it just reminds me of staring off into the sky over the lights and into the stars, wondering in a bad way. As i sit here, this couch that i have made my home over the last 4 days, in a new, supposedly better apt, i wish that i could at least see the buildings of clayton again, instead of the blank walls. I hope to be a better man for what i went through in 1306, but i fear that all i really did there was cement myself as content with some good, any good at all. That i was able to ignore the nights i spent silent, alone in the dark because i knew that the sun would come out, so no action was required. I think nightly now about getting into Junior and setting off after the setting sun. Not stopping till i ran out of gas, only to abandon the hoopdie and hitchhike until i found myself somewhere. But i am too much of a coward to do something like that, something that would require me to accept that i must enact change for change to come. It has come about, like all realizations, because of loneliness, in this case a great sense of it. I love my friends but we aren't new to each other any more, and when we get together its more like we are reading from a script till we all get to go home. I want spontinaity back, but as i claim that i am still laying on this couch, at 6 o'clock in the morning, having done nothing in days. I feel that i may just be old, and that it is over for me. I am done, and have been since 1306, but i just hadn't realized it until now. There is a reason that nothing i write has a happy ending any more, and it's probably because i don't foresee any type of happy ending, just a drawn out life with a few specs of self-awareness that don't amount to anything. But hey, why would my life be any different than it has in the last 10 months? When i worry about it, i just remember the NASCAR turns and the figure 8s in the lobby, and think, "well, it wasn't all bad."

Dear Dad

I got back tonight from the bars, yes, i know it is a monday night, bud it is a study day tomorrow, so i can sleep in as long as i want then not sleep at all. I know i am very different than you, but i like to think that my best qualities, the ones that i love the most, come straight from you. The reason i am writing you now is when i got back, i felt like i needed something, something beyond the ordinary that has come to make up my life, my life that you and mom have been pretty much shut out of, but has become my routine, my habits. I know i have shut you out, but that is because our relationship has become one of praise or scorn, no middle ground, no time for talk, no place for argument. This is different than it was in high school, when i could come back from a night out at jon's or jordan's and you would still be up, and we could talk for hours. I would get back at 2 but not go to bed till 3 or 4 because you and i would share so much about life philosophy or you would tell stories about your life before me and beth and sam. My life has become something of a mystery to you, this i know because it was partially my inention upon leaving home to go away to college, something that i never would change, but when i made the decision, i didn't know enough of the negative side, the side where we would grow apart, as well as jordan and jon and i would grow apart. The real reason i think of you right now, at my buzzed state, on a tuesday as it now apparently is according to my computer, is because what i wanted most, what i wanted out of the ordinary, is a showerbath. I know you know what i am talking about. Memory is a weird thing, i am sure you could tell me 10s of stories, or even maybe hundreds of times that i would not remember, but i have some memories from back before i went to school that i remember step for step, thought for thought, action for reaction. I remember that i had many a showerbath in my time, but i remember a specific time, from before i was capable of bathing myself, from before the addition added a shower to the upstairs bathroom, that you watched over me while i took a showerbath. Afterwords, you put the towel over my head and spun me around, then walked me to different places, then set me down in my chair at the dinner table. I was so confused, but i loved it. I didn't know which way was north (a skill you have since given me that helps me every day) and that was so disorienting and amazing. I could have been sitting anywhere from the den, where i would have asked you to jump over the first hole in mario, to the living room couch, and it was amazing. It was the first time, and i promise you there have been many more, being in a new city and not being sure of directions will do that to you (rome was especially strong that way), that i have ever been completely disoriented.

I remember sometime in high school, either junior or senior year when i came home and you were watching old home movies of us kids. The one i happened to walk in on was me standing in our old (now two houses ago) living room. I have no recollection of the time and from how young i looked, it might be before i have any memories at all of the time. But it was the time that you taught me how to kick something. There was a ball among all of the other things you allowed to be strewn across our living room, and you walked me through brining my foot forward and making the ball move. Watching you watch that video, and watching the video myself, i realized how much you have given to me in life, and how much i don't even remember well enough to thank you for.

Dad, i love you, there is not another person in this world i would chose to spend eternity with. I know, from thinking about old conversations we have had, that i am in a similar place as you were when you were in college. I know that the belief in God has escaped our grasps. I will graduate in 374 days from college with the same major you had, although we went about it in infinitely different ways. I will thank you forever for how you raised me, how you talked to me honestly about Marquette High, how you consoled me on my decision to join SigEp here at SLU, and how you still play a strong role in my life when i come home from the bars and need something different, i need a showerbath