Hallucinations

One always finds one's burdens again - that's funny, right, because everyone here is completely caught up in school, in housing, in a web of semantics, and I'm sitting here, high on the communal Halloween candy, half asleep, half delirious.

In small group, their thorns are prelims and roses are prelims; every bud is about going to sleep. They ask questions to which they already know the answer - they talk to hear their own voice. But its not annoying. All I hear is the rhapsody outside the Donlon lounge and try desperately not to burst into uncontrollable, maniacal laughter.

Because its unimaginable, the pain and utter hopelessness that I feel for a couple hours every day. Because these fruit snacks and kimchi and carton of eggs can do nothing but send me on a quest for muffins and pineapple-topped bread cakes, and all I have left is another 60 to 90 minutes in the gym, fighting utter exhaustion. And yet nothing can touch me. I feel like Hyperbole and a Half, completely unfeeling, stuck in the world, but also the opposite of her, like the Oatmeal on magical grapey beverages - transcendent.

It's wild, because just as the shooting stars and precipitation patterns and freshman wriitng seminar books validate us (or is it the other way around for the books...), so there are the limitations that stop me dead. When I'm not supposed to be outside, I hallucinate. When I walk to class, I can hear bells playing I Lift My Hands. One moment I'm on the men's level of playing badminton, the next, I lose all mobility in my wrist.

But it all feels normal - all of it; every facet of this spiritual debacle. Everything is meant to be, the dropped jean sizes but the very same panic, the abundance of freedom and the resulting excess tortillas and bo burgers; the utter fatigue, the impossible discussions. Everything, everything, is in place. Its a war but one with a victor already decided.

They can tell. They can all tell. From all the small group leaders, the rest of the small group, the friends, the roommates, the acquaintences, the families... the friends, from Berkeley to UCSD to Harvard to UTA. Its insane, and more real than anything can ever be.