Emma Journal

A few selections...

5:30 am

 offhand sigh      withdraw
 no reason.  Ev'rything's fine.
 Strawb'ry applesauce.

1/14/01 5:15 am Home

 amazing how small
 and alone I am, in the
 midst of these people

 "Travel."  You might've
 called the name of a lover,
 the way my heart leaps.

 Silvery sound; wind
 moves through the trees, rustling leaves, 
 leaving me restless.

I just spent an hour and a half writing stuff in my journal. I pasted pictures in for the first time, which makes me happy, 'cause I want to do more of that stuff. I rambled and it came out goooood.

Radical honesty with your journal will improve your relationship.

Technically 12/11/00 1:41 to 3-ish am (at) My desk

I feel sort of bad and sick and hurtful writing this...okay, really that way! It's impressive! I'm looking forward to my new journal. *wince* There. I said it. This journal has been so good to me... it's perfectly bound, just the right size and thickness, and the cover is so gorgeous. Silver leaves... *sigh* But my new one is beautiful too. So big! And unlined! It's a bit... boggling. Will my handwriting go irretrievably downhill, or rather, how far downhill will it go? Will I do more art and paste more stuff in? Will I use it enough? Who knows. But yes...I feel better for writing this, but still disloyal. I know this journal now, and god how it knows me. Certainly better than anyone else I know. It's seen a lot these past few months... obviously. Just look at the pages I've filled.

I've never named my journals I'm not that good at coming up with names (or titles), and it seems...unqise somehow, given all the potential I feel in journals. It could change themes and moods and feelings halfway through, then again on the tenth-to-last page...really anywhere in the book and on any page of my life. So I leave my options open, as usual, just in case something new comes along.

I suppose what I'm really saying is I am bad at and incapable of naming myself. I often attach rather specific feelings or moods or outlooks or personalities to names, and then of course fail to find a name that fits and describes me. The closest I've come is Mossaia, which is the only name I've really made up. I feel fairly comfortable as Mossaia, almost as I do with Emma... though obviously there is a lot of mental training and tradition that dictates the way I respond to Emma. I don't even consciously think about it most of the time it just automatically refers to my person in my mind.

Amelia is strange I squirm in Amelia. I like the name a lot, actually. It's really pretty, and it sounds graceful. But it also sounds like other people. It sounds like the name on my ID card, the name I sign when I deposit a check, the name on my social security card, the name on all the impressive-sounding academic subjects and courses I fear and avoid. It sounds...like me in a few years, I suppose. A girl no, a someone who has a job and maybe even a car and a coffee maker, someone who lives away from home and pays bills and I don't know what else.

I don't know that person. Obvious, I suppose, but true. I don't know what she reads, where she spends her time, what she does for fun. I don't know her friends, her morals, her attitudes. Is she cynical? Oh God. I hope not.

I hope she still knows how to have fun. I hope she still thinks and does random things and laughs and enjoys every minute of them.

Emma seems like a label to me. Not a name so much as something people call me, something I am associated with. Which is not a bad thing; I have absolutely no dislike for it or any objection to being called it. I can't really picture other people calling me Mossaia or Amelia. They'd forget to call me my new name, I probably wouldn't remember to respond to it, so... unless I find a name or until I decide I really love Mossaia or Amelia and unless I get really sick of Emma, I'll keep my nickname.

12/8/00

I'm really pissed/sad/lonely/tired, the last of which could have something to do with the fact that it's four am. I've been up the past two hours getting audition information off of ballet schools/companies websites, thinking over and over to myself how badly I need to get into someplace good, and generally making myself stress out. I'm SO incredibly pissed at Internet right now...I can't use IE and I can't check email and I can't MUCK and I can't IRC. Fuck it!

11/27/00

I'm tired. I'm so tired...

I'm so tired of being secondbest.

10/30/00 7 am ish CST My room

Ok, that was mildly scary this morning. But I wrote the prettiest paragraph in a (sane) email to Becky, and I had to share. I write a lot of good stuff to Becky...that's, like, two out of five so far. ;) But whatever. Here...

The sky is the most delicate light blue and the clouds are perfection, the most perfect soft pastel colors imaginable, and they're moving really fast and they are floating past the tree across the street I always watch through my window, the huge, graceful tree that has been growing in this neighborhood far longer than I have. The clouds are moving fast, and right now, I would rather be up there than any place else in the world, floating along and feeling the humidity of the early morning air as the wind plays with my hair and my clothes and whispers in my ear and all I do is smile delightedly and drift gently along, half-dreaming.

10/6/00 9:30 pm CDT My room

I am obsessed with peeling things. I absolutely LOVE to peel things. I'm not talking about cutting the skin off of a vegetable or peeling a banana or any of that...I'm talking about things that really PEEL.

Glossy paint on a smooth surface. Acrylic paint in its old container. New-Skin^TM. Skin. I haven't discovered anything else yet.

I will happily halt almost any activity to sit, kneel, stand slack-jawed and peel something. I'm not quite sure why, but it feels so right. It's cleansing peeling away the old layers to reveal the new (or just the unseen, if you want to be picky about the paint). It relieves stress faster than anything else. It calms me. I guess peeling's the equivalent of a cigarette to me, but I don't randomly get cravings to peel it's triggered by seeing a plastic cup coated with dry paint, a callus, a minor blister. I don't understand it.

9/29/00 1:15 pm CDT My room

...I feel a little sad now. That part of me is gone, it is no longer a secret...and I suppose I am mourning it. It is a small, quiet sigh outside in an isolated garden, not full of grief, but simple and tinged with a little bit of dull regret. A cloudy day with no real edge to its lukewarm breezes. Waking up from a nap content, disoriented, and still a bit tired. ...

9/26/00 2:30 pm Home

Secondary or S waves speed up when they pass through dense material. Imagine how fast they'd move through this earth/space science course!

9/13/00 Around 7 pm Denver airport, gate B20

I'm boarding the plane to Austin now - standing in the tunnel waiting for the line to move, walking, stopping.

Ok, on the plane. Bleeaaah! At the gate they had a sign flashing that said, "Ask me how you can earn $200.00 in travel credit", so I asked if they needed people to go on the nine o' clock flight. They said they might, so after calling Dad to make sure it was okay, I volunteered to wait for the nine o'clock. They said they'd call me if they needed me, but they DIDN'T, and I'm on the plane!!! ARRGH! I could have used that to go visit Marina and other Californians. Waah.

On the bright side...we're pulling out of the airport now (7:20), and there's an absolutely GORGEOUS sunset. I like to fly home at precisely this time. It's just so damn FITTING to end a journey at night.

Oh, God, I'm so depressed right now. It's so wrong that I have to leave all these wonderful new friends after just a week or two. It hasn't really hit me until just now that I'm going back to boring HOME & may not see them again for a YEAR. Or more. I want to scream and yell and throw a tantrum right here in seat 18A as we're taxiing down the runway, which we are, and taking off, which we just did.

SHIT!

I am up in the air, flying higher, tilting, turning, circling, straightening, as this metal bird takes me AWAY from everyONE and everyWHERE I want to be for a long, long time. Disconnected from my camp community, talking on the PHONE, posting things on the WEBSITE, trying and failing to regain and recreate a camp experience.

I watched Avi make his "Portland Please" sign today, he sat outside the office and drew the letters slowly and carefully, tracing over and over the lines the black marker had made before, and I envied him. I envied his adventure, his courage to go do whatever the hell he wants. I don't have that courage yet, but the desire, the desire to go do something unusual and exciting, is growing. The courage I plan to work on. I have a feeling my parents will have to let me fly soon, whether they're ready or not. Where I'm migrating, I don't know yet.

(editing out some lame stuff here, just barely deciding to leave the above cheesy paragraph in)

I will miss the strength. I will miss the frantic depth of friendships, the shallow intensity of attractions, the creative energy of so many minds working together. Altogether and absolutely essentially, I will miss living life and being around others who live life fully, as if we had a week, four days, three days, two days, one day, a morning, a bus ride to the airport, a goodbye at the gate remaining.

zowie. these last two paragraphs are awesome. -reanna

yay emma. this is real and right on. please post more. jessica (wb)

Mhmm! Oh, yes. *affirmative head nodding* Real. And, good. , more please and thanks for giving me some lovely images and thoughts

Heh, thank you. :) - Emma

whoa...how perfectly described. That just summed up camp completely, fully, honestly. I like the way you write, dear girl. Landis