September 10, 2008

I am a Classics major. I like to watch movies, walk, eat and sing, but that only when nobody can hear. I have a father, mother, and brother, all of whom still live in the city where I grew up. I was a ballet dancer for ten years, and after I stopped I didn’t know what I was. I am allergic to nuts, cats, and dust mites, and am a Capricorn like my mom. I have always preferred being by myself, and in coming to college, for the first time I miss my friends. I get bored with things easily and have yet to find my passion. When I was younger my family used to take vacations to Hawaii every year during Presidents Week. We’d go boogey boarding, and one day I decided that I was ready to go out to a cove where the waves were bigger. You were supposed to ride the wave to a point and then stop yourself because the cove was manmade and led not to sand but a concrete wall. But I forgot to stop, caught up in the thrill and my daring, and was sucked down and sent tumbling in the water. That day I lost a fin and maybe my courage with it. In elementary school when I first started having sleepovers at my friends’ houses, I used to wake up in the night sobbing and have to call my parents to come get me. That feeling, like a fist grabbing my insides and twisting, is the same homesickness I feel now. I live mostly in my head, and call upon music rather than people for help. I am a listener and advice-giver, a pleaser, fixer, worrier, and list-maker. I am a sister envious of her brother’s confidence and praying for his happiness; an adult eager to shed fear and become the person long desired; a child who misses her parents and counts the days until she can go home again. If I’d had to write this last month I don’t know exactly what I would have written, but it would have been very different. I hope this means next month I’ll want to change my answer.