A Letter to PhysicsGuy

(I'm not sure if this letter was ever sent...)

Dear PhysicsGuy,

Well, you said that I should email you, so here it is... A terrible thing happened to me this morning; I turned my calendar over and discovered that one of my history papers is due on Thursday and I haven't even chosen a topic! Anyway, them my mom told me that she can't come on Saturday. She is going to Pairs tomorrow night and is staying through the weekend. She won an appeal for some Nazi wife-beating client of hers who is paying for his "dream team" of lawyers to visit Paris. I am really happy that she's going... She really deserves it. But it kind of sucks because she didn't come to the last concert either...

Oh, want to hear how weird Scheisser is? I called him today and his machine said "either I am on the other line or out of the office right now." I wonder who he was trying to impress... He has no other line and no office...

Things are so weird lately. First of all, today is my dad's birthday, so it is making me all reflective. I mean, I know that things are better, but I feel like a walking corpse. It's like Elvis Presley. (Remember my obsession?) In 1956 he was young, handsome and in control-- unstoppable and unmatched. But much like the Energizer bunny, he kept going and going, never outlasted, never gone, until he was sequined and bloated and one more white light in the Vegas skyline. Elvis was a walking corpse-- a legend already in America's memory-- an icon of the past, like General Custer, but before he had even died!

I don't know if this is making sense, but I feel like I have died and what I am now is not who I was, but it is not anything new either. If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said "there never will be anything new and it sucks" and blah blah blah... If you asked me a month ago, I would have said "who needs anything new? I'll just float here in limbo and drug myself into happiness every day." And now, I feel better and I know that things will get better, but they're not better yet, and so I am in a kind of limbo between life and death. (Or death and the next life... to keep the metaphor more precise). It's just a really strange place to be.

I feel like I am floating... I am not swimming and I don't think I'll drown, but I am drifting on the death o the old, letting myself be held by the sea, licking my lips and saying "it's okay" when my eyes start to sting again.

This whole thing with Scheisser is really getting to me too... I just don't want to trust anyone anymore than they trust or need me... I think that true love is finding the person who needs you the most and you need them in the same way... that way everyone's needs are met and you are bound together by a suffocating web of dependence called love. I don't know if that sounds warped, but it's true... I am no longer worried about whether what I think is right or wrong or what I do is right or wrong. All I care about is freedom for thought and the kind of eternal rest of one's mind that means happiness.

I don't know if I told you that I read Crime and Punishment three times this summer and was identifying 100% with Raskolnikov, but that was what gave him his constant burning fever... it was his mind. It's not the idle mind, but the active mind that's a breeding ground for the devil and I want to swallow those words form myself that betray me and paint me thickly before my own eyes.

When I look back at the past year, all I see is streaming nights of running color and seamless smudges of time, burning holes into my eyes and clouding all of life's edges.

I just know that I have died and am waiting for what's next. The death was painful and I fought it at every turn and I still linger, a ghost, at home, but I sit here with a headache, a semester to salvage, an arm desecrated, and a lot of hope. I just want it to be the beginning again, and I am going to do it better this time.

Anyway, sorry for babbling for so long about all of this. I have to get started on my paper before Opera Ensemble rehearsal tonight. But I'll see you tomorrow.

Thanks for listening.

Lots of love,
Hyde