Lilly

The world scares me right now. I work on my take-home final for complex analysis and flip through my new linear algebra textbook and read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! because these are all things that help me combat the fear. The day is a battle, the week is a battle, the month is a battle. And they are mean opponents, but eventually the bell has to ring to signal the end of the round. The arrow of time always points forward.

Things are changing faster than I can process them. One day I break, and confess to a professor that the stress is half killing me, and something changes even in that brief, vulnerable interaction. I don’t know what it was. But now I find myself floundering, having lost my footing somewhere along the way and now I’m reaching down with my toes but I can’t find the bottom. My advisor always says that doing real science is like getting tossed in and finding out if you can swim. But until very recently the pool’s been shallow enough that I haven’t had to. And now I’m lost, not drowning, not floating, stuck between states of existence, between schools of thought.

I’m going to pick up tarot again. I video called my mother today and she called it the “woo” of the universe, that which cannot be explained. But it seems, right now, difficult to hold onto what can be. She did a reading for me earlier tonight, texted me the results. There was some clarity there. More than I’ve had in days. I need all that I can get if I ever want to stop hiding from the world. ♦