Diaries I Read:
OK, so I chose a few poems to share with y�all. I chose the saddest ones. I�m not claiming they�re wonderful or anything. But they captured something that was important to me at one time.
COLD
Rain falls,
pours into pocked roads
in this cold town
my teeth chatter,
bone on bone,
beating rhythm into my head.
I duck into this empty home
and frown at unfamiliar walls and
strange smells of
not home.
I sit alone silent
watching drops fall on the window.
My eyes follow
a single night�s tear
that slowly slides
down dark glass.
I don�t know exactly when I wrote this poem, but I know it�s about my freshman year at UC Davis. I think I�ve said before that my first year at college was REALLY really hard. There were so many times I was seriously tempted to pack everything up and head home. I think I knew deep down that I wouldn�t quit like that, but I really wanted to. In the end, I�m so glad I stuck it out through those years. I think it really toughened me up and helped me develop into a more complete person, but it still sucked at the time.
I was just so LONELY. I didn�t know what to do with myself. I�d never been thrust into a situation where I didn�t know anybody before. I didn�t know how to make friends. I became more and more self-conscious, and that turned into a vicious cycle making it even harder to meet people. I was pathetically homesick.
I started associating every sad, lonely feeling with Davis itself. The town became the vessel for my unhappiness. I blamed everything on the town. I hated everything about it � the people, the trees, the shops. The rain. Oh man, the rain. And the cold.
Coming from Southern California, I had no idea what cold meant. When it got �cold,� that meant putting on your jeans and wearing a sweatshirt over your T-shirt. I didn�t even own a decent jacket. I had no concept of layering. I wasn�t used to wearing gloves. Or a hat? It took me several months of freezing myself to the bones before I figured out how to dress for the weather. And I was still cold.
And man, the rain. In SoCal, we get, like, two inches a year. But up there it rained non-stop from October to May. And of course, my only mode of transportation (besides my feet) was a bicycle. I can think of few more miserable things than riding to class on your bike in the rain. It pelts you in the face, your hands are wet and freezing as you hold the handlebars, your 50-pound backpack is getting soaked, the bottoms of your jeans are muddy and wet . And then you get to class with a wet jacket, wet backpack, wet face, and wet hair. But sometimes you�ve built up some body heat from the bike ride, and when you step into the stuffy, heated classroom, all of a sudden you�re hot. So you peel off the outer layer, but then sometime in the middle of the boring lecture you start feeling your wet socks and you�re cold again. Miserable, I tell you.
So that pretty much captures my freshman year. I�ll save the other poems for later.
Working at home - Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2004
Toronto - Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2004
On the way to Toronto... - Tuesday, Nov. 09, 2004
A Good Day - Monday, Nov. 08, 2004
Another letter - Thursday, Nov. 04, 2004