[ recapitulation and pendulum ]

i hate this feeling. this fuzzy feeling, like i've just woken up after sleeping for too long. like being in high school and waking up feeling a little under the weather ...going back to sleep and sleeping through the whole day. like waking up on a cloudy day with no idea what time it is.

it's supposed to be spring, yet i look out the window and see snow all over the ground. it's so cold that even the cheapest of my friends can't smoke a whole cigarette before they're too cold to stay outside any longer. it's like god has decided that it would be funny to play some kind of sick joke on all of us and freeze the state over for spring break so none of us can leave town.

we find the only loophole in the plan by making our own fun here at home. we have enough movies to last us for every other cheney winter to come. things started to change, though. the crowd continues to shift, change...new faces come and go like chinook winds melting the snow back in my hometown. and while others around me seem to be plowing straight ahead, i work through it like traditional sonata form. present the theme, transition, develop the theme, retransition, recapitulate, coda. something like that.

except i haven't gotten to the coda yet.

driving around spokane with him was yet another amazing feeling. we had nothing better to do, so we popped in a few of his favourite cds [ i wouldn't choose...i always listen to the same cds, it would be a waste of his cd collection to have me pick ] and wound through the streets, wondering whether they're really two way or not...people parked like it was a one-way street. it seemed like it had been awhile since we hung out, just me and him. it was a definite recapitulation, underlined and marked. i had missed that theme through the long, dissonant development of winter quarter.

a week later, i sat on one of the couches at a friend's apartment blinking back drunken tears and staring at the pendulum clicking back and forth from under the clock on the wall. i tried not to watch him sleep on the other couch across the room. i stayed up for two hours looking out for him because...that's what friends do. i wondered what i had done to deserve this...and it wasn't bad luck i was condemning. i was wondering why i was having such good luck. why everything seemed to be going right. i mean...i don't deserve it. i drank a million glasses of water to get rid of the feeling before falling asleep with my head propped up on my hand and finally laying down to sleep on the couch. i woke up every time he moved.

half a week later feels like fifty years. him and i keep talking about things that happened last week as if they happened decades ago...strong emotion does that to you. i think it took that drunken night under the pendulum to finally ackowledge that one of the only things on her mind that night a half-week ago was whether or not he was going to spend the night in her bed. a couple of days of not speaking to someone feels like an eternity.

she had met someone else that night, though...which contributed to the change of faces tonight. the first night that the ice had seemed to melt in our house, even though the ice outside remains. now, she has someone to sleep in her bed that isn't him. she made the transition smoothly, modulating to an easier key to play and not looking back.

he was more than content doing his laundry.

i'm still waiting for a coda.

[ 3.21.02 ]

all writings (c) cydne zabel 1996-2002, all rights reserved