Spring Break

I keep trying to do work, trying to honestly convince myself that I’m going to get things accomplished. I stood in the English department hallway today, staring at pictures of Oxford and London and Prague and beautiful, faraway places that I don’t have the money to travel to right now. In her journals, Plath is talking about stifling under the weight of teaching. She writes “More & more I realize how I must stop teaching & devote myself to writing.” A friend wrote to me, postcripting at the bottom: “I worry about you. It sounds as if you are craving another adventure.” How can one not stifle when every day is more of the same–rising too early in the morning, praying for caffeinated rejuvenation, up the hill to class, down the hill to home, sit in a coffee shop and read, read, write, analyze, flip papers mindlessly, go home, go to sleep, all the same torturous routines, all the same people and places day in and day out. 

I have wasted God-knows-how much time this week scribbling away, on bits of paper, my journal when I have it to hand, the computer, miscellaneous thoughts. The best things I’ve written I can’t share–too soon, too small, too raw. I dream of publishing–Sylvia and I, I’m learning as I read her work. Verse has been pouring from circumstance, from heart, from this hard and beautiful year with all its small tragedies and let-downs and failures. 

I cannot wait for the spring holidays. I want to sit down by the lake, right by the edge of the water in a sundress and let the sun kiss every part of me, for hours and hours. I want to fall asleep by the water, halfway through a good book, and then wake up to finish it, to drowse when I please, in the lazy late afternoon sun. I want to see my high school English teacher and my history teacher. I want to see my family and eat real food again. I want to drown in my writing, in words, to be absolutely swept away. All the little beautiful things I struggle to remember here. 

Only a week now, just one more week of textbooks and deadlines and responsibilities and then I’m free, caution just a kiss blown into the wind now.