Journal

one day to first quarter
august 25, 2001 ~ 1:12 a.m.

I'm leaving for college tomorrow. I supposed I'm half excited and half worried. Or perhaps more than half worried.

I'm worried mostly that I'll have trouble keeping up with my work having been out of regular school for two years, plus the fact that I never could keep up with it when I was in regular school. I did the least amount of work possible while keeping my grades relatively decent, I never studied, I read what I needed to know to write the report or pass the test. I'm sure I could have done better, but I just didn't have any reason to. And now it will all be so much more difficult. This isn't an easy-going private high school where the rest of the kids are strung out on ritalin or prozac, this is college. And it's not a huge public school like my junior high where I can just fade into the crowd.

The other thing I'm worried about is just dealing with living in a small town I've barely been to and being able to find everything I need. There won't be any Fresh Fields stocked with soy yogurt and vegan muffins, and there won't be any CD stores or bookstores, at least not big ones anyway, and I have trouble finding the CD's I'm looking for as it is, even in a big city like DC. I won't have a car to get around, although I think everything's close enough to walk. And I'm also worried about sharing a room with someone I've never met, and being able to live in half a 12' by 14' room.

I suppose I'll just get used to all that, though. And certainly getting away from my parents, and of course learning and getting a degree, is well worth it.

I went on a run tonight and then decided to go for a walk through the neighborhood one last time. I wanted to go down to Rock Creek Park once more before I left but I never did, and it was too far and too dark to do it now, so I settled for the field behind the Episcopal School where me and my friends used to go to perform Wiccan rituals every full moon in eleventh grade.

I stood there for a while, staring up at the stars and remembering the vision I'd once had there, lying on my back, that I was clinging to a grassy ceiling and almost falling into the star-spattered abyss.

Then I saw something in the field about 40 feet away, walking slowly towards me. It was four-legged and a tawny brown, and for a moment I thought it was a dog, but I soon realized it was a deer. It kept walking for a moment and then stopped to study me. Then five more deer appeared from the darkness beyond, walking slowly through the shadows, looking at me and at each other. I was so humbled by this, by six deer being there for me to see, that I sank to the ground to watch them.

One deer, perhaps the first I had seen, seemed to be a leader of sorts, and kept walking around me, as if leaving a circle with a radius of perhaps 30 feet, and me at the center. It kept bobbing its head up and down, and I don't have any clue as to why, except that it may have been trying to show me that it could see me or something. After twenty minutes or so of watching them, they went further into the shadows so that I couldn't see them, and I decided to leave. The whole thing was so bizarre and beautiful, like the gods were speaking to me.

previous ~ next

Diaryland