I wrote a post and then got rid of it. And then I remembered that part of starting to write again has to be getting into the habit of writing daily - or as close to daily as I can manage. I gave it a rest during exams because I had absolutely nothing to say, but now I have no excuse.

I have the apartment to myself tonight. My roommates all left for home this morning. I'm enjoying the peace and privacy, but it's weird to be the only person here at night. I've checked the lock on the door about six times and keep feeling the burners on the stove to see if they're warm. 

I don't go home for another two days. I'm delaying my departure for as much time as possible - I've picked up some extra shifts at the library so I have a non-negotiable reason to stay. I've been dreading this - spending the Christmas break at home - for a very long time. Although, really, it's a much stranger mix than just dread. I'm afraid, and then there are moments where I miss home so much it breaks my heart.

Either way, it's only a few weeks and my life is here now. My life is here, and my life is mine. Nobody can take the world that I have built.

h.

My very best camera. 

I'm done. I wrote my last exam on Friday morning and since then I have been almost consistently occupied. Or asleep. I am tired. But I'm free.

Yesterday I went out to run some Christmas errands and ended up at a fairly large art-supply store. I can never really resist art supplies but in the last few years have become very good at talking myself out of actually purchasing any - because, you know, I don't have time to use them or I'm really not that good at (drawing, painting, making dinosaurs out of polymer clay) or whatever. But yesterday I left with a set of new drawing pens. And today, during my shift at the library, I drew. For hours. 

I've missed this. I've missed this like I've missed writing, like I miss my camera if I don't pick it up for a week. I sat at my desk and got absolutely lost in my drawing and didn't think about anything and it was another one of those moments of feeling calm and productive all at once. I have no idea why I want to do these things again suddenly but I do and, really, I always have. Whether it's a camera or a blog post or a drawing, I need to filter the world through my own lens somehow. 

So I will. 

h.

Taken with a disposable camera. I love how weird the light is.
 

I have one more exam left to write and I am teetering dangerously on the windowsill of sanity. Since last Wednesday, I have done nothing but sit in my apartment beneath stacks of books. I go outside occasionally and briefly. Every once in a while I have a shift at the library, and I study there, too. 

But tomorrow, oh boy. Tomorrow I am free. 

h.

By Keri Smith
(Whose blog always, always makes me think.)

Tomorrow begins the onslaught of exams. I've been complaining endlessly about my exam schedule - but really, it's not that bad. I write 2 tomorrow, and then one every day for the 3 days following. And then I'm done. It's a lot of studying all at once, but honestly, I'm really relieved to be finished quickly. It's the anticipation of the whole thing that drives me the craziest. 

It's been a while since I've had to contend with 5 finals at the end of a term. The last 2 years have been filled with creative writing classes, which generally end in a final portfolio instead of an exam. Most of the time I get to the end of the term and feel relatively relaxed - so much of my work usually ends before this point. 

Ah, well. In 4 days it will all be over and I get to wake up without an alarm clock and read whatever I want. 

(And hopefully write more interesting posts.)

h.

I have no idea where this came from.

I've been studying all morning. It's all very dull. I'll probably continue to complain about this for the next week. (But then I'll be done. I'll be done in less than a week. I'll be done in six days.) 

Outside everything is grey. They sky looks thick, like a blanket. I am still in my pyjamas. My roommates are making pancakes in the kitchen. I think I should make more coffee, or maybe take a shower. 

I usually have a good sense of priority. Even though I often yield to a ridiculous internal hurricane of emotion, I feel like most of the time, I can separate what I’m feeling from what is, objectively, rational. I can organize my worrying, and I can often carry it unseen. But sometimes I feel the weight of everything at once, and it knocks me flat. My mental defenses are good, I think, but they aren’t infallible.

These last few days have been days of being knocked flat. From where I stand, it feels like there are so many things to anticipate and I have yet to make peace with the fact that, ultimately, I have no control. I will prepare for my exams but I can't guarantee that I will ace them. I will apply to grad school but I can't guarantee that anyone will want me. I will go home but I don't know what I'm going home to. I will begin the next semester - my last semester - but I have no idea what comes afterwards. And I can't separate any of these leaps from any other. I am leaping into everything all at once, and it's too much. I hate so much not-knowing. I want to be able to count on something. 

But I can. I can count on small things, like mornings with coffee and roommates and snowy white light through the window. I can count on love. I can count on the fact that through whatever happens next I will not lose myself.

No failure or fear can have me - I will not let it. 

h. 

Illustration by Yelena Bryksenkova,

2:30 p.m.

I am waiting for a text message from a girl I used to dance with. We’ve made plans to meet for coffee. I am dreading it because I haven’t seen her since before I quit, and my decision to leave came as a total surprise – to me as much as to anyone else.

She and I had danced together for years and as such have been friends for a very long time - but in the year before I left we’d grown apart significantly.

(My disillusionment with dance had as much to do with my falling out of love with the sport as it did a sudden unwillingness to tolerate a certain shallow insincerity - from everyone, in general.)

In the year after I left, my life got very weird and I felt absolutely consumed by it. Energy I might have put into trying to maintain our friendship was directed elsewhere. I just didn’t think about it. I don’t know if I would have wanted to think about it even if things had otherwise been fine - but I probably would have worried about it a bit more. As it was, it barely crossed my mind.

So I’m afraid that she might want some kind of explanation, and I do not know how to explain. One morning I woke up and decided that both this thing and these people that had taken up seventeen years of my life simply had to go - and they went.

7:30 p.m.

I shouldn’t have worried about the coffee so much. I remember, now, why I don’t miss this – why I don’t miss any of it.

No explanation was required on my part. In fact, I’m not sure words were required on my part at all. Five minutes into our visit she asked me how I was, and when I began to answer, she interrupted. And continued to talk. About herself. For two hours.

Going into this I felt badly for not trying to maintain a friendship. Now I understand that there had long stopped being a friendship there to maintain.

I know I’m oversimplifying. My frustration has as much to do with her self-centeredness as it does the permission I give her to be self-centered. Or the permission I used to give – used to be willing to give. The relationships I have with people are much different now. I am less and less content with passivity. I ask more of the people I spend time with and I give more, too.

Quitting dancing felt like the first time I looked at a situation that I had long ago begun to take for granted - a situation I felt trapped in - and decided that it no longer fit and that it had to go. It was the first time I ever actively chose my own life.

Coffee today was a reminder that I have continued to do that ever since. 

h.

My mornings start like this. On the post-it notes is a phrase I've been repeating to myself over and over these last few days - Peacefulness does not come from escape. It comes from working as hard as you can. In my constant quest to quiet my mind, this proves to be my most effective thing. Work. Just work. Things won't get done unless you do them. 

My polka-dot coffee mug reminds me of Amélie. The coffee is fancy and vanilla-flavoured, a gift from my roommates. On my computer is a mix c.d. made for me by a particularly wonderful person. I've been listening to it every morning - it's full of the kind of music I love, but from places I would have never known to look. I appreciate the mornings so much more now that it gets dark so early. The brief period between when I get up and when I have to go to class sometimes feels like the only light I get to see all day. 

I was afraid my entire post would end up a documentation of the various hot beverages I drank and the places I drank them. This is the end of an earl grey latte from a fancy-pants coffee shop down the street from where I live. I've found that if you drink tea as the sun goes down, you're less sad about the dark.  

I read Persuasion for a while. Jane Austen and I only occasionally get along. I feel like if I lived in Regency England, I'd be absolutely bored to death. 

In the evening I went to the library to study and stayed rather late. By 11:00, the place was fairly deserted. I wandered around with my camera before going home and despite the freedom of having nobody to be self-conscious around, the best I could come up with was a bathroom-mirror self-portrait. 

The next time I try this, I'll be sure to do something besides study. 

h.

Tomorrow is the last day of classes. I am heading into a bit of an exam-writing marathon, but today I Did Not Study. I tried to study. I got my books and my papers and sat down and started to read... and then I made supper and did all the dishes and talked to my roommates and talked to the girls who live downstairs and cleaned my room and called my mom and now I'm here. 

I am running out of steam. On one hand, I feel like I've had a handle on things this term and I know that I only need to keep it up for a bit longer. On the other, I can only convince myself that I actually care for so long. Today I couldn't be persuaded, but I had better get it together tomorrow. 

This weekend I took some pictures of my roommates for a Christmas thing. I've missed taking pictures. During the school year, I only really pull my camera out for special occasions. But in the middle of my wild spree of procrastination today, it occurred to me that (since I'm always writing about how I have no idea what to write here) I could turn this blog into an occasion if I wanted to. I've decided that tomorrow I will photograph my day and post what comes of it. Maybe it'll help to have some visuals for guidance. 

h.  

Once again, I've been coming here and starting posts and then deleting them. Building this habit is going to take more work than I thought. 

I haven't been sleeping a whole lot. I've had a lot of really late nights - a combination of finishing assignments and having some sort of social life, both of which I don't mind losing sleep over. But I've also been having a lot of weird dreams - so I wake up a lot throughout the night and wander the apartment and stare at the ceiling and talk myself into closing my eyes again. I'm used to not sleeping because I have things to do, but I'm not used to being unable to find sleep when I want it. It's frustrating. 

Today during my shift at the library, my boss was teasing me about the most recent book I took out. (I've been reading Just Kids by Patti Smith, because lately I'm kind of obsessed with art in all its forms and want to know what other people have to say about it.) She thinks it's funny that I'm reading Patti Smith, although I don't know why. As she left for the night, she told me she thought the library would be pretty quiet until it was time to close. "You can study," she said, and then she paused - "Or you can read your Patti Smith book." 

I told her I should probably study. She said, "Aw heck, h. You've got to enjoy your life, too." 

I like to think I do enjoy my life - but sometimes when I'm in school, I feel like my brain's stuck in a trap. The thing that bothers me the most about being an English student is feeling like I have no choice in what I read. My room has become an absolute jungle of books lately, though. I continually find things that interest me, and although I have a lot to finish reading for school I can't help collecting all the things I wish I could read if I had the time. I have books I used for research and novels I need to read for class stacked next to The Chronicles of Narnia mixed in with Irene Nemirovsky and Patricia Highsmith. Taking these other books off the shelves and looking at them for a while feels as close to literary freedom as I'll have until the end of this degree. I start the books sometimes but I rarely finish them. I feel like I can't justify reading unless it's something I'm supposed to read - and only reading what I'm supposed to read drives me insane.

So I'm making time for Patti Smith. Because I have to enjoy my life, too. 

h.

Around my birthday every year, my grandma tells me what she remembers about the day I was born. My mom called her to tell her she was in labour and going to the hospital. My grandparents followed my parents in their car, and from my grandma's position in the front seat, she could see my mom in the back of the car my dad was driving. "Your poor little mom," she tells me, "I can still picture her face in the car window. She looked so scared. That image haunts me to this day." And then she clutches her chest and closes her eyes and sometimes, depending on the drama of the year's re-telling, she shudders. 

My mom was, at this point, married to an alcoholic. She married him knowing exactly what she was dealing with but hoped that somehow it would all get better - that she could make it better, maybe, I don't know. And, knowing that, I wonder if there was a part of her that thought that I would be the thing to fix it. To help. If he wouldn't stop for her, maybe he would stop for a baby.

When I hear that story, I can't help but imagine it as this sort of realization for her that the moment of truth had finally arrived - she had staked her hopes on this thing that started out months and months away and now here it was and the time had finally come to see if it would do what it was supposed to. What she needed it to. After this, her life might stop being hell - or it wouldn't. 

I don't know whether it did or not. It might have, for a while. 

h.