Pictures

I scrolled through four years worth of facebook pictures today, trying to figure out if I my face had changed at all since high school.

To me, I still look like me. In my mind, I have the same eyebags, the same hair (more or less), the same smile that goes up more on one side giving me smile wrinkles that I can do absolutely nothing about. I was a bit more athletic in high school, but aside from the muscle mass that has been replaced with fat, not a whole lot has changed.

But scrolling through four years of pictures takes a long time, and going through all of that it's impossible not to realize that I've changed. Maybe I'm just not too introspective, but it's only in rare moments such as this that it dawns on me that so much can happen in four years time. And that's just looking at the things that have been catalogued on facebook.

When we get older we tend to look at a certain time in our lives as a whole blur of things, and come to the realization that "ah, those were good times". And when this judgement is passed that is how our memory will remember it for the rest of all time. The little details, the fact that from day to day life is an amalgamation of happy, sad, exciting, boring, they all seem to fall away. I think I do this with memories of things even just a couple of years ago.

But being where I am now, retrospect seems to be so much more important an undertaking than it has ever been before. I get this feeling in the bottom of my feeling parts (As a student of physiology, I cannot believe that it is actually my stomach that is feeling emotions until I can explain it using physiologic principles), that something is about to be wrenched away from me.

And it feels really sad. But it's not the kind of sad that you feel when a beloved pet dies, nor is it the kind of sadness that you feel when you fail an exam. I think that it's because it's still coming (however fast it may be coming), and not yet lost. It's an anticipation.

It's not depression. It's not a melancholy that something good is going to end very soon. I think it's the strangely painful realization of just how much I love the life I've lived, the school I've been in, the people I've met, everything that has happened to me over the last four years.

All this time that I've been living it I've had no time for introspection. Things have always just gone by, passing from one thing to another. It was only at the start of this school year when I passed down an aisle of trees with the early morning sun streaming through them and onto my car's dash, that this feeling hit me like a brick wall.

It's not always been easy. Often it has been very, very hard. But looking at the sun and those trees and the road that lay before me, I knew that I loved all of it.

How four years can change a girl.

And how I have been changed. Three years ago at the end of freshman year, I wrote this really sad thing about how I felt college life had ripped the 'me' from 'me', and how all the hard work I was doing was crushing everything that I thought that I was. I was really cut up about it at the time.

But what that destruction has brought me I wouldn't trade for anything in the world. I don't mean to say that I don't have regrets. I am one of those unfortunate people who feel the weight of the things that they weren't able to do as acutely as a papercut to the index finger. What I mean to say is that from something that I thought crushed me, let me grow into another thing entirely. And I know now that sometimes you need to break something to make it better. Sometimes you need to start from scratch.

This is all affected by my sentimentality. But I'll never have the same connection that I do to the memories I have again, and so the sentimentality is mandatory.

College life is ending in about 2 weeks. I have a chokey feeling in my throat just thinking about it (I have read a physiological explanation for this, but I can't remember it). There's nothing that I can do to slow it's coming, and I can't paralyze myself with trying to take it all in. But I can't bear to look forward just yet, not when there is so much for me right here.

Bother

On Saturday, I filled up my new planner (which I bought impulsively after seeing that it was 50% off only 20 days into the new year) and I realized that there were about a hundred things to do with my life, but none of them past May. 

It's not that I don't know where I want to be in June, or that I have serious doubts that I won't be able get there, but it's that the decision is not in my hands. 

Maybe I should be clearer. 

I'm in the middle of applying to med schools, and I don't seriously believe in any school except one. And yes, I have decided, though I can't say I'm completely sure why. But just because I have decided doesn't mean that it will be, and come June there is the very real chance that I will be nowhere at all. And only this Saturday did I realize that it was bothering me. 

(There have been a lot of 'I's in this post so far, and though I can't deny that I can't think of much else to write about than whatever it is that I experience, I hope I'm not sounding too self-centered.)

But I have been bothered, and today that led me to the LS Bookstore and the impulsive purchase of five books. 

This is impulsive primarily because I am lucky if I have a large enough chunk of time to devote to finishing one non-academic book a semester, much less five. And given the number of deadlines that loom before me, I really shouldn't. 

But here I am, writing this, and planning to read one of the books (a short one, Fahrenheit 451) before I start my work for the day. I haven't decided if I actually will, but I might, because I just can't focus. 

Next time I'll be a bit more coherent.