Laying here in my bed, being here in the condo, it does not feel so strange. When I close my eyes, I can nearly orient myself anywhere, and besides that, my cheese, cracker, and peanut butter dinner tasted pretty good. Really, the only thing that feels amiss is my boxspring under the mattress. Its the first time since highschool I've had a box spring and the difference is palpable. You can always feel the various resistances among surfaces: when you place a glass down on granite, versus wood, versus plastic. The resonance, the "give," is all whack. Thats how I feel on this bed, a little floated, and little insulated, from the frame.
As I type that last line, I know this insulated feeling extends beyond my form to this bed structure. I am suspicious that I am not reacting more to this transition. True, I've been preparing myself to transfer from Loyola to UT since a little after Thanksgiving, but the roar of emotions and anxiety I used to feel are gone now that I am home. Does geography have to do thought patterns? While school sometimes was painful down there in bouyou-land (I'm just kidding; New Orleans isn't like that, just the rest of the state) I knew, through the tumultuose anxiety and "mind games," I was atleast (at best?) alive and thinking, and that as long as I could maintain that state of discomfort, I was could be aware of some of the strings in this life-game. Now that I am home, the view from my window is downgraded from New Orleans garden district to two-story office building and reception tower. The rambling trolley I hear in the distance is actually a cargo train.
Worst yet, I predicted this predicament. I totally called it. And at the time, I added, "And since I will be home and comfortable, I will be aware of all these differences, "sadments" (my noun hybrid of things that are sad) and will hardly mourn them as I do now in anticipation because I will be numb, and the world will seize me and all my emotions will be tempered to be moderate, proportioned, acceptable." And you may say, well that sounds a little melodramatic, but I will tell you, no, it only sounds that way because your emotions are more monochromatic than you would like to admit. And now that I am home and these prophesies are coming true, and I realize that the final clincher, final nail in the coffin, is that-I can say-the proof is, I am not mourning. I am floating insulated, and the thoughts that agonized me and horrified me when I was away are no more than a small pea between my mattress and boxspring.
