So it's my last week here and I'm trying to take it all in, but it's hard to realize I won't have the city outside my window for 4 full months. I like change, but not so much the process of changing. I am too sentimental to just not care.
Last printing class is on Friday (I just plan on printing fun pictures from Coney), then Noah & The Whale that night, followed by a Yankees game at the new stadium, then my parents come on Sunday. I remember the car ride here so vividly that it feels like yesterday, but I'm going home with so much more than I could have imagined. And I like it. "To go from this to the world of 'grown-up' reality. To feel the tender skin of sensitive child-fingers thickening to feel the sex...To feel the sex organs develop and call loud to the flesh; to become aware of school, exams (the very words as unlovely as the sound of chalk shrilling on the blackboard), bread and butter, marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death, and self. What a pathetic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood. Not to be sentimental, as I sound, but why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life? To learn snide and smutty meanings of words you once lived, like 'fairy'?...To be aware you must compete somehow, and yet that wealth and beauty are not in your realm..To learn that you might have been more of an artist than you are if you had been born into a family of wealthy intellectuals."
-from The Journals of Sylvia Plath.
Nichole read that to us the other day, and it all made perfect sense.
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