For Whom the Break Tolls

I had to get out.

My roommate and I were like two atoms randomly bouncing around a room. The first, next, and last time we would hit would cause an explosion of unknown substance and quantity. He treaded on that invisible bubble that one has around one's daily actions that is neither consciously constructed or subconsciously dwelled within. I looked at the temperature outside to remind me there was a further universe whose denizens I felt all too unattatched from. Even the cab driver's awkward monologue on the highway that wound through the bare, black trees did not lengthen my shortening path towards the terminal that would terminate my first 4 months in Connecticut. I boarded the plane and left my outer layer of skin behind me to freeze in the cold.

I exited the plane in San Diego much as I did three weeks earlier during the Thanksgiving break: sagging eyes, a hitched back and an uneasiness about my appearance. What was there upon my disembarkation at Thanksgiving that wasn't there as I disembarked for winter break was the internal itching to be back in my original environment, to see familiar faces, to be comfortable. And I was.

My feelings for winter break were similar, if not weaker. It had only been three weeks since I slept in my own bed and saw my grandparents, for whom asking me to spend time with them is like me asking a girl for a date, and saw the few people for whom my existance meant more than another school on their facebook profile (cursed thing). Now that I've been home more than a week, I remember why I was so adamant on leaving this place.

I'm now stuck in the inescapable bubble that was my summer life here, post-Japan to be specific. So far it's been a string of lunches and dinners, coffee houses and un-returned voice mail messages. I wonder if I have really grown. If the four months so far away really did anything. I still feel like I'm a spectator to everyone else my age growing up. What is it that I think I am? I still have no girl to be excited about, no up-and-coming project that people want to talk to me about. No major trips anywhere on the horizon. I sat in a car with someone last night as we called 12 people. We left 11 messages. The 12th was going to dinner with friends. We weren't enough in each other's company.

I am not enough in this city's company. Nothing changes except its size and expense. My family dinners are in near silence. I am further frustrated with my parents' inability to be socially exciting every day, perhaps because they're showing me where my social ineptitude comes from. I want so badly for them to go out, to be with people. They hardly leave. I asked if they had plans for New Years. "Nothing special. It'll be pretty quiet." That could have been their answer for any of 1,000 questions I could have asked.

Instead of reading I've been playing my new video game. This is my own fault.

I won't be making new relationships while I am home. Let me rephrase that. I haven't made new relationships since I came home. And these relationships weren't enough for me before. So there's no way, with my newly academic mind, that they will be enough now. I'm just rehashing old threads, coloring over things that were already not outside the lines, and continuing to avoid a certain old one, but that's another story.

I'm a silhouette of my old self; only, for now, it is the silhouette who is living, talking, hanging out. My real self is stuck as a shadow angled onto a wall, forever hungry and gasping for air.