Brothers on a Hotel Bed
You may tire of me
As our December sun is setting
Because I'm not who I used to be
No longer easy on the eyes
But these wrinkles masterfully disguise
The youthful boy below
Who turned your way and saw
Something he was not looking for
Both a beginning and an end
But now he lives inside
Someone he does not recognize
When he catches his reflection on accident
On the back of a motorbike
With your arms outstretched, trying to take flight
Leaving everything behind
But even at our swiftest speed
We couldn't break from the concrete
And the city where we still reside
And I have learned
That even landlocked lovers yearn
For the sea like navy men
Because now we say goodnight
From our own separate sides
Like brothers on a hotel bed
Like brothers on a hotel bed
Like brothers on a hotel bed
Like brothers on a hotel bed
You may tire of me
As our December sun is setting
Because I'm not who I used to be
a new chapter
I've packed one box and one tub. Before I left for Thanksgiving, I pulled all of my food and dishes out of the middle area. I now own nothing in the common area except one chair. I look at my small little room and wonder, How did I get to this point? This was supposed to be the best year, I was rooming with three friends and we were supposed to have the time of our lives. But I'm packing up halfway through, getting ready to move out. I really feel more pushed out. And I hate it when other people control what I do. I'm moving out because something went horribly wrong and we can hardly stand to be in the same room with each other for long.
I find myself deleting and blocking people from my life. And not just her, I've finally blocked him from my life too. I've never been one to put up a permanent wall and not allow for change. At least not with friends. I've always held the door open just a little so that if someone wanted to sneak back in so we could work things out, they could. But it feels oddly good to put a full block on him. Before I was still tempted to check what he was up to, but now I can't even do that. Which is good, because neither can he. It's not what I wanted at all. I was willing to stay friends. I wanted to stay friends. But he drew the line clearly for me, even if he couldn't see it himself.
Like I said, I'm not one to take orders. Orders. You may be in the military now, but that doesn't mean I am. I don't
have to do what you say, or even listen if I don't want. My life
never revolved around you, so why should I hurt other people just to spend some uncomfortable time with you? I have a boyfriend that you don't even know, and I hope never will know. You don't have even an ink blot's worth of right to insult him, to insult
me, and it's not funny, and you knew that! I asked you to stop, no I begged you to stop, so we could still be friends. I don't know what it was you couldn't get over, but I wasn't waiting on you. You made a choice way before I left. You
used me. How can you expect me to drop my life, and someone who truly loves me, for you? How is that fair? You never wanted me, you just wanted me to want you. And that is so far from what I have now. I have something
amazing now, something you have
never had. And I'm not even sure if you deserve to have someone love you. I don't think you would love them back, and I know how that feels. No one deserves that. So let me be happy.
I've finally opened a new chapter in my life.
wake up... life is calling you home
9:30 am, Monday, February 18th.
My phone rings and Dad is on the other line; he sounds like you sound just after a car accident, scared and out of breath. I am not fully awake yet, as we do not have school on President's Day. What I comprehend out of the conversation is Mom... hospital... some high numbers, blood pressure... another big number, heart rate... doctors don't know what's wrong... love you, bye. click.
I sit stunned for a moment in my bed before my entire body shakes and tears trickle down my cheeks. I get out of bed, take the few steps to the door of my room, turn around, get back into bed. I look at Rochelle, asleep, and for some reason I don't want to wake her. Instead, I text Eric to see if he is awake yet. No answer for what seems like forever. My mind is racing and my senses are screaming... who else would be awake right now? Weston. I text him the same thing, he responds right away. Where are you?... Third floor lobby.
I get down out of bed, grab my jacket and slip out of the room. When I walk up to Weston, I give him a hug before he can even look up from his physics and begin to cry. He immediately puts me in his lap and I spill the story... how my mom is in the hospital and I don't know what happened, or what is going on, or when I will hear from them again. He works on calming me down and distracting me from the situation. My phone buzzes. Eric. I call and ask him to come to Knowles. Is anything wrong? Yes. I'll tell you when you get here. Bridger appears in the lobby and quietly sits down across from Weston and me. A few moments later, Eric walks up the stairs in the T-shirt and pants he was wearing yesterday. I can't recall words for a short moment, then I spill. My mom's in the hospital. Something wrong with her heart. This brings on a new wave of tears and I switch over to his lap. I'm sniffling, the tears are rolling, and I'm shaking on top of it.
I grab my jacket and a tissue from my room and we walk out of Knowles. Eric takes me to a bench in the sunlight by the river. I grasp my cell phone in one hand and his hand in the other. I can't stop shaking. We sit for a while looking out at the river. At some point, we decide to go downtown to a diner for something to eat. He orders a stack of blueberry pancakes and we split a Black Forest shake.
We walk out of downtown to the hospital to see Sarah, who was in the ER the night before with a stick through her neck from a skiing accident. She seems alright, a little loopy on drugs, but recovering. Dad calls me while I'm in her room and I walk quickly from the room. He tells me that Mom thought he might have scared me this morning and that she is fine... well, not fine, but... okay. The whole time I just want to hear Mom's voice, to know that she is still there. It's not enough to be told that she is stable, I guess in the back of my mind I need the reassurance the sound of her voice would give. But she is still in ICU, so I won't get that today.
Eric and I walk back to campus... he has frisbee practice. When I can finally bear to let go of my phone, I decide to take a hot shower. Joe and Rochelle have figured out that something is up, and bring me food from Staggering Ox. Then Rochelle, Joe, Eric, and I go to the ice rink. We skate for an hour, maybe more, and it helps take my mind off the situation. I am actually smiling for the first time since I woke up that morning.
My thoughts wander between how my mom is doing, how my dad is taking it, and how I would handle this without someone there to hold me. The fact that Eric is there to give me a shoulder to cry on and an arm to cling to means so much. It seems ridiculous to try to put it to words, words aren't enough. All I can say is thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for worrying with me. Thank you for everything.
takin it easy
so i am fairly sure that no one checks this anymore, but that is ok... i am going to try to write again.
updates:
i finished my first semester of college and am throwing myself into my second.
life at the dorms really isn't so bad, although i am definitely looking forward to next year when my roommate and two of our friends get a 4-person suite... that means i get my own room again!
rochelle seems deathly ill the last few days and it really sucks for her... because tomorrow is her birthday! i hope she feels better tomorrow, because we have a surprise for her that i think she will really enjoy... at least i hope so.
i am not getting enough sleep for my classes this semester... call me a slacker it's probably true. unfortunately i don't seem able to balance my need for sleep and my need for activity.
i think college has just as much drama as high school did, and i cannot seem to get out of the way, although it is cooling off for the moment.
speaking of cooling off, i live in montana now! and it is too damn cold here all the time... as of right now, it is snowing... a blessing because that means it is slightly warmer than it could be outside...
i can't wait the warm weather to come back, sometimes i wonder if i wouldn't have been better off going to college somewhere in the south after all. i do love the southwest, i just wish i could have found a program i liked. but then i wouldn't know all the people i know now and i wouldn't see my family at all.
jason goes to school here too, and it usually is a good thing, although he seems to dislike me lately and there is nothing i can really do to change that.
i am finally playing soccer again for an intramural team, and i think i am realizing that i would rather play the way we used to... four of us fooling around in the old stadium at 10 o'clock at night because that's when the humidity finally lifted enough for us to breathe... i am a competitive person, but i don't have as much fun as i used to.
sadly one of my favorite classes this semester is precalc... i didn't realize how much i missed math until i got back into it and actually wanted to do my homework.
my other favorite class is called the sociology of alternative religions. that's code for cults. the only problem is that it is 3 hours long on a tuesday night... but i find it easier to stay awake for the entirety of that class than i do for my hour long classes.
today i skipped my 8 o'clock class so i could be awake for physics and precalc... we had a test in precalc. i was sitting in physics listening to a discussion over who knows what (it is a class about the theory of relativity and i think it might be way over my head...) when i heard the professor say, "and Caitlin's trying to take a nap back there..." i hadn't even realized my eyes were closed. that should tell me something... if i sleep without even knowing i'm doing it, i am probably doing something wrong. my precalc test went ok, i didn't study last night and i really only didn't know two problems on the test, i think that might be my highest grade this semester.
i realized the other day that i am a time bomb waiting to explode. and if not me, then my kids, if i have any... what i mean is that my family has a bad history. my grandmother died of skin cancer this past spring, her husband had kidney cancer, my other grandmother had breast cancer, and her husband died from heart failure. we have aunts and uncles with depression, alzheimers, and so many other problems that it's not funny anymore.
on a happier note, college is turning out to be a positive experience so far. things are going fairly well, i'm staying active, and i have a good set of friends. i have a job working with the foreign student office and i'm just starting to feel comfortable in what i do, although it's not terribly exciting. i do hit the party scene occasionally and i feel comfortable with the people i go with and the fact that i don't drink, don't smoke, etc. etc. i'm fairly organized and in control of my life, except for the sleeping thing, but i think that comes with the territory. all in all, life is going as smoothly as it probably could be, at least as much as i would like it to be, and i've got no complaints.
from mid-may to mid-july--the crazy life i live
sorry about the long absence... i've been very busy lately. plus i didn't have access to a computer with internet. so back off! so where to begin...
i'll try to mention senior sneak in as nice a way possible. it's a tradition where the senior class gets together one last time in a confined space under the false pretense of having one last hoorah but what is really just an excuse to prank one another and piss us all off just before graduation so we can all hate each other in the end. lets just say that you have to be a certain kind of demented to come back from that trip having thoroughly enjoyed your classmates. i'm sure that are some... but i wasn't one of them. as Tom Nelson told my mother, the ones who enjoyed it should still be in middle school, and the ones who didn't were probably ready to graduate last year. don't get me wrong, it wasn't all bad, i at least know who is worth hanging out with now (not that i didn't know before, this trip just rewrote it in BIG RED letters).
the very next day was regional track. and it must have been a horrible day for blue valley girls--none of us qualified. on the other hand, it was a tremendous day for girls high jump--the four qualifiers cleared 5'1" and one girl cleared 5'3". unfortunately, i only cleared 4'8". which was good considering the amount of stress i had on me and the too few hours of sleep and the horrible stiffness in my neck all that day and the next from sneak. i still wish i could have cleared 5'0" sometime this year. i was soooo close at the Manhattan meet--closer than Briana Bruna and the girl from Wakefield.
and finally, graduation. i don't know what to say except that it probably looked like i was the only one who did anything in that class. seriously. it lasted 40 minutes (thank god) and wasn't terribly hot this year like it had been every previous year. they changed the day to saturday and the time to earlier in the afternoon in hopes of keeping the place bearable. anyway, i was part of the last pair to walk in, seated on the inside of the left row. Mr. Winter started it off with a dead mike, but when that was finally finished Dustin got up for the salutatorian speech. we'll just say that it was awful in the worst sense of the word and spare the kid further shame. personally, though, i still think the 3rd place kid deserved it more. but maybe that was just because he was my friend. then it was time for my speech as valedictorian. everyone told my how good it was afterwards, but i'll let anyone who wasn't there read it and form their own opinions.
This year in the play, I stumbled over some lines in our Friday night performance that set the crowd laughing. There were some classmates on stage that told me how surprised they were to hear me mess up. Caitlin, Miss Perfect, stumbling in the clutch. Well, I can tell you that I am far from perfect. When I first started thinking about this speech, I had no idea what I would say. I didn't want to give the same speech that happens many years, about how great a class we were and how much I would miss high school. Honestly, that is not the idea I want to leave you with. So I did what our teachers have been trying to get us to do for years--I researched it.
I read some good speeched--some inspirational, some funny, but mostly, I found by reading these that I wanted to write the speech my own way. I wanted it to have a little bit of "Caitlin flare." However, I did find one great idea from a speech entitled "Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah." It reads, "Graduations are often likened to a door closing on the past behind us. We're looking ahead to the future, closing the door behind us, storing the past in a closet. Some of us will look into that closet repeatedly to reminisce about our bygone youth. Others will pick through it occasionally, remembering the good parts. Some will slam the door shut, push all their weight against it, throw 5 dead-bolt locks across the door, wedge it shut with a chair, and run as if there were a rabid animal in there, not looking back."
That speech goes on to say that our future will be affected by our past, no matter what we do with that closet door. So now I add my own advice to this. We should be able to more on from our past and not be held back by old defeats. We should also be able to build the rest of our lives on something more substantial than just what we accomplished in high school. So I suggest we leave the door slightly ajar, so we can peek in when we need to. We shouldn't swing it wide open and try to jump back in, but we also shouldn't run away never looking back. Remember our teachers also taught us to learn from our history.
High school represents only a stepping-stone on the pathway through our lives. Like the Robert Frost poem that Mrs. Shultz taught us in 6th grade says, that path had many bumps and turns. I worked very hard to be standing here today, with scholarships and honors to prove it. But in the end, being the Valedictorian is really only a number. Every one of you has that same potential to be standing here instead. So my advice to you, my fellow seniors, is to grab that potential, twist it and bend it any and every way you need, and make it work for you.
Thank you.
some people told me that i didn't sound or look very nervous (but that may just be in comparison to Dustin), but my legs were shaking so bad that I swear I was making a tap dance number with my heels on the stage. thankfully, i had several encouraging faces to seek out in my class (namely the one person who gave me the most crap for my mistakes in the play) and in the crowd, so that calmed me down a little. i then proceeded to explain that our senior gift was on its way. i sure i was still shaking when i sat down in my chair off stage and Mr. Schreiber started speaking. i think he was just as nervous as i was, he's a new teacher that is not used to speaking in front of crowds of his students' families and various community members. after that, i was again called forward to start the senior video which i and another student in the class below had created. it turned out very well i think. i'm still waiting to have our copy of that and the ceremony. when we walked, i was second or third out the door to hug all our teachers. then the line of endless hugs from mostly people i didn't know or didn't care to remember. afterward i felt like taking a shower. my coach and mom's good friend Bridgett was the only one who almost made me cry--she was near the end and i'm not entirely sure why she was the only one with such a huge effect on me. i guess she's had a lot of influence in my life.
as for my party, someone should have told me how much of a headache it is to be the center of attention! but i guess then i wouldn't have invited so many people. my great grandma came and even remembered to bring jason's graduation card from a couple years back! she's a blast. i was exhausted by the time it was all over and was falling asleep on the floor watching scrubs with my best friend Dana and jason and morgan steele--back from the Navy stationed in Japan.
the next few weeks are really a blur. i worked for the first week after graduation, then mom, dad and I went up to Montana for a week, then when i got back everything seemed lost in a haze of boxes and wrapping and tape. my only breaks were to see Pirates 3 with a couple friends and hanging out with Ryan. mom and i left sunday morning early with the dogs in tow and didn't get off the the road for 22 hours. hardly any of which she woudl let me drive. granted, I-80 was terrifying for the hour i drove on it--i've never seen so much traffic in my life! i swear every second i thought i was going to end up killing us all. the dogs snore and were about as stressed out as us. i don't recommend trying to drive from Kansas to Montana in one day unless your superman, or jason.
so there's my update--i'm heading to Missoula for orientation this tuesday, then the week after that to California for FCCLA nat'ls, then back to Kansas to pick up the rest of our stuff. as of today still waiting on the moving truck to arrive--should be tomorrow or the next day at the latest.
prom
so prom was this past weekend... i had fun, at least more fun than last year. it mighta been awesome if the dj had played decent music. but i had a cool date, so except for the music, i had a good time. after prom, however, is another story. i think after prom has always sucked but i just didn't realize it before because i was hanging out with good friends. not to say i wasn't hanging out with good friends, i just got bored a lot faster this time. anyway, seems like everyone is doing this travel map thing, so here's mine:
addiction
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines
addiction as:
compulsive need for and use of a habit-forming substance (as heroin, nicotine, or alcohol) characterized by tolerance and by well-defined physiological symptoms upon withdrawal; broadly : persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmfulpeople aren't addicted to cigarettes, it's the nicotine. when cigarettes first came out, no one knew they would cause lung cancer and other problems. but the companies knew that nicotine would be addictive, so they put a lot in to get buyers hooked. they used their employees as walking billboards by getting them to smoke on the job. the cigarettes got higher and higher percentages of nicotine as people started to realize how bad they were and tried to quit.
at least that's the background information for the story line in John Grisham's
The Runaway Jury. and just the thought that cigarette companies would continue to sell harmful substances after they were proved to be a main factor in health problems. and target younger and younger crowds just to
sell a product. it makes me sick
my grandma has lung cancer. technically it was caused by a mole which could be blamed on the sun. but she smoked for
30 years thinking cigarettes were not a problem. and you can't say that they weren't a factor in her many health problems. it's not like her cancer is a new thing. she has been up and down in health for i don't know how long. but now it seems to be getting worse. for a while she was in treatment for the spreading cancer. but then the medication was making her go blind. so they took her off that and tried something new. and now the drugs have weakened her system to the point where she can't take them anymore. and the cancer is attacking the weak spots. she's 80 something and she has trouble breathing, doesn't have the energy to get up and move, can't see well, and the cancer is hitting her brain as well, so she has memory problems too.
when you have someone this close showing the effects of a lifetime of smoking, i don't know how anyone can continue smoking. you see it every day. you watch them deteriorate. i don't
care if it is hard to quit--
do it already--i don't want to lose anyone
else.
