On brain farts and melancholy

This first week of work has been really exhausting. You come back, you have to get into the swing of things - and fast, or you're fucked. I accidentally left the grocery store with the plastic shopping basket still in hand, which just goes to show what completely ridiculous brain farts will occur when I'm this out of it.

Oh the feelings.

Emotionally, I feel like today I reached my limit for the week. I'd love to go straight into hermit mode at this point, but unfortunately I've got my part time gig at Mr. Stone River's office tomorrow evening, so I'm still going to have to try to be presentable. By the time the day was over today, though, I was pretty far from presentable, and I can only tell you guys how beautiful it was to change into a new flannel pajama and cozy up with melancholy movies and feelings. Eventful Thursdays call for melancholy and pajamas. It's just one of those life rules.



It was the last day of one of my regular students today. I might've mentioned him earlier, but he's this rather introverted character who doesn't smile much, and he's moving to Germany tomorrow. After our first lesson, I thought I'd bombed pretty bad. He really seemed to not be feeling it at all. Then, I checked upcoming lessons, and what did I see? Row after row of bookings. We had double lessons almost every Sunday for months. He would almost only take my lessons, and he gradually opened up more, started laughing and smiling, and I really looked forward to hanging out. Today alone, we had two lessons booked first, and as soon as they'd finished, he asked me if I had any free lesson slots, and booked his last two for the afternoon. In the very last one he started telling me a little about trips he'd made when he was still a student, and not ambitiously throwing himself into the textbook as he otherwise always does, and it hit me that somewhere along negotiation role plays and business phone call practices, we'd sort of become friends who actually care about each other and were sad at the thought that we wouldn't be hanging out anymore. I could tell I wasn't the only one feeling it, as the atmosphere was really subdued. I bought him cookies as a farewell gift, he asked me for my Facebook to keep in touch, and like the stalker I am, I went though his photos after work, only to find so many of him from a few years back, smiling widely and naturally, and I'm left wondering why that so rarely came out now, and why it was like even though he'd smile with me, it could be described at best as echoes of the ones I saw in the pictures. When he left, he shook my hand and bowed deeply, and I was left to write his final note into the system, and then just experience a sense of... I don't know, loss.

It's weird, that kind of intimacy that comes from not really officially being friends, but still meeting on a regular basis and having a vague idea about what's going on in their lives at any given time. I was nagging him to go to the doctor's for weeks to check his cough, for fuck's sake. To have them step out of your life again just like that feels really weird. I didn't owe him anything, he didn't owe me anything, and yet here's this weird sense of abandonment that I can't really shake. To kinda know someone, without really knowing them at all, and then knowing that you probably won't see them again - it's strange in so many ways. But then again, I guess that's just one of those things that come with the job. You get close to people, or... I don't know, not even actually close, but within some sort of proximity, without ever really connecting fully, and then they disappear.

I kinda feel like I'm mourning.



Maybe I'm just having a really melancholy night. Moonlight just sent me his new song on Facebook, and it brought with it this feelings montage in my mind from last year - Saturday mornings in bed with him, running my finger over his underarm tattoo, listening to him rap for me in Korean, feeling completely crazy in love with him... and then all the inevitable shit that followed and damn near crushed me that one horrible day. Simultaneously, even though his rap voice is different from his speaking one, I can hear that that's the Moonlight I still hold so extremely dear, and I wish I could see him. I miss him so bad. Not exactly in a romantic way or anything, or at least I don't think so, but I miss the closeness. I miss the seamlessness.