trying to delete some old mail, i find all the correspondence that led up to my trip to costa rica, and i find myself suddenly feeling almost homesick. i miss the feeling of pure opportunity that i was so full of then; right now i'm happy but worried about applications, frustrated at work, feeling sometimes like i started a big rock rolling down a big hill and now i have to keep running fast enough to keep up. i feel a thousand miles and a hundred years away from who i was at christmas, much less when i was in costa rica, and much, much less who i was in philadelphia. certainly it always creeps me out to read old journals - the intensity of emotions that now seem so benign or cryptic references to incidents i no longer remember - but the darkness of that last winter, the desperation of that last summer... it's hard to align those memories with how i feel today, to realize that i lived through all that and am still that girl. costa rica feels immesureably far away, like a moment outside of time. which was, i suppose, what i wanted it to be. all i have to remind me is my steadily-worsening spanish and the fact that i still can't eat a snicker's bar without feeling sick. the jungle keeps shoving itself into my poetry, but the experience itself feels very distant, almost impersonal.


i find that i am very much an out-of-sight-out-of-mind person. it requires a pretty conscious and continuous effort for me to maintain relationships with people whom i don't see very often. the old, old friends are pretty easy because they know me, and because they fill such important roles in my life. there are some things about which i must and can only talk to silke about, some things that will always and forever make me think of nika. but i'm bad at correspondence, and bad at lingering. i just never realized that it applied to whole life experiences as well as people.