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03.21.02 - 3:28 p.m. i skipped out early today. I had planned on doing it all week and for some reason that made all the difference in the world. I needed to see karlo. I knew this as i always know it when i dont know what else to do. "Ah, little kate" he tells me and inhales deeply for longer than ive ever seen anybody do, filling his full chest up with nicotine and squinting a little before letting it go in a chuckle. "Are you practicing even?" he takes my right hand in his and squints at my fingernails, checking their length. "Good" he mumbles and smiles. Im not playing actually, but the habit is so deep inside me that i leave them to grow and cut the other hand short and my guitar stays in the case and gets nudged around by peoples feet searching for room in my small apartment until robin gets sick of it and tries to put it away. I know immediately though, my eyes trace the corners of the room and my heart drops, someones stolen it and its my fault bc i stopped loving and my breath gets short and i find it then. Under her bed or beside the fan or in the bathroom closet and ill play something quick, villa lobos, to remember the rush of notes in my fingers, and then something slow, bach, to remember why it is that i cant play anymore. And thats how i leave it everytime with a slow sickness in my stomach of eric and that loss and the loss of myself to it. I remember my fourteenth birthday and the warm possibility of julliard and then, the slow cooling off, as other things competited for and won my attention. And im here now, at school, and its amazing how much we change withouth realizing it. How much our world shifts and other things come into focus and other things go out. I forget about this place...i forget the feel of it i think, like a lost sweater found, the familiar weight of it on your body, the length of the sleeves, remembered. Im young corporate today, as i am everyday. Modest black pants, trendy boots, attractive shirt, nice purse, appropriate lipstick and im out of place now. The familiar ache of jeans with holes and thrift store shirts and meticulously messy garage band hair. I forget how perfectly green the grass is, how they keep it all one height, how lush it looks from everywhere. I think of my apartment and our lawn with tire marks from tims truck and 14 year old mums choked to death in a cememnt planter. I feel the warm gray of our home and our handed down furniture and i can see it behind my eyes, the cement shade that my life has acquired. Everything here is so bright. I forget and i cant imagine that i could. From the quad to the elevator and when the doors closed i felt dizzy, thrown into black from the sun off the sidewalks. Ive memorized the shapes that the trees make of themselves on green green grass and how it changes as the sun goes down and comes up and goes down again. Ive memorized every step of this place, every breath in and out has been recorded and coming back is like walking into a noisy room blindfolded with people touching me everywhere. Uncomfortable but intoxicating too, it makes me want to take off my shoes and lay in the grass again, to be myself back then and not myself now. To let myself go back into that place and sink into the arms of it, grateful. And i cant. Its impossible. Even as i feel like i have never been away i know everything is different and there is no place for me. And mostly i dont want it, i dont want it bc of its impossibility and i dont want it bc i am afraid of moving backwards. But as i watched karlo watch me, all i wanted was to be attending a lesson. I wanted nothing more in the world than for it to be a year ago and for us to be bullshitting before my lesson. My guitar at my feet my music already set up, nothing but that after me, nothing but that before me. All that is gone...and thats what i know right now. � 
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