November is here and somehow it's almost over 𐙚⋆.˚

Hello, my friends!

This week was a short week for me. I only had class on Thursday due to Tuesday being Election Day. I had a full week off after my last class on Thursday of last week! Which never happens and was so nice. It felt like time passed at the normal pace it's supposed to go. Things usually always feel too fast or too slow, but I was able to do so much in that week and I honestly had a pretty good time! So, last Thursday I went and saw Guillermo Del Torro's Frankenstein at the Alamo and then Friday and Saturday I went out with Aliana for Halloween. As stated by my last post I was... as you know... Thomas Shelby. "My name is Thomas Shelby and today, I'm going to kill a man. Today is Derby Day and the murder will take place this afternoon at the Epsom races. It may be that I am able to escape after the killing. The odds are not good. Which is why I'm writing this letter..." Aliana was hot Zombie Miku. Her blue contacts scared even me and when I saw her, stone cold, staring at a man that tried to cut us in line I was scared. Like, I had to avert my eyes. I bet that man had a little pee run down his leg. But we had a fantastic time. Friday we went to a bar called Ellie's (my first outing on the Corner) and we literally just dicked around for a couple of hours. I had such a good time. On Saturday we went downtown and tried a few different bars. We met up with some friends from work and I ran into a friend from class who was dressed as the Hamburglar. I also saw a man so beautiful that I almost lost my mind. The clocks turned back that night for daylight savings time and I think that was God's way of doing me a favor. Not only did it soften the blow that I had to work in the morning by giving me an extra hour of sleep, but for that extra hour we were all existing in some sort of liminal space at the bar. The hour in that space, in my brain, was simply inserted into the fabric of time for me to observe that man. I promise I'm not a freak, I just wanted to tell him he was gorgeous (yes, feminine words are necessary to describe this man when the masculine hot or cute did not do him justice). But after a soul crushing, uneventful culmination of the evening (there's something wrong with me) I ended the night alone in my bed writing in my notebook. That sounds like I wanted to take him home. I didn't, I simply wish I would have told him he was gorgeous. Anyway! Here are a few pics from last week!

I think after this semester I am going to need the Gordian treatment. I'm all tied up in knots. It feels like when you find a necklace at the bottom of a bag and the chain is all kinky because its one of those o-shaped chain link necklaces and every time you attempt to unravel it you can't get a grip on the chain because its too small and then once you finally get your fingers around one of the loose outer layers of the knot it just shifts and then you're back to square one. That's where I'm at. This is what I've gotten done in the past weekish though! (It is a far cry from what needed to be done.) I:

1. Read criticism for my Arthurian Romance seminar

2. Worked at Burton's and had two truly lovely days of work (I love working there)

3. Wrote my Prospectus for my seminar paper in that class

4. I had a successful trip to the Dedalus Bookstore and found copies of Shakespeare's sonnets, Donne's Love Poems, Plato's Symposium, and Antony and Cleopatra

5. I also found, at the GESA book sale, copies of Paradise Lost, The Complete Norton Shakespeare, a book on Narcissus and male melancholy, and Love in the Western World (paid $10 THANK YOU GESA)

6. YK came over and we brainstormed ideas for our Ulysses seminar papers and talked about basketball

7. Also talked about our go-to, bitchy phrases that every time we write them it feels like spinning the threads of the universe... "it is the axis on which the play spins.... Certainly blah blah blah blah, (the comma MUST come later otherwise the certainly doesn't achieve its full effect) X says this, however..."

8. I made cajun mac and cheese and she brought cookies

9. Completed peer review for Arthurian Prospectuses

10. Submitted a topic proposal for Ulysses, got shot down, submitted again, was questioned, attempted to clarify, was shot to Hell again

11. Took mac and cheese to Logan and Saskia and also got a new pair of shoes

12. Gym interspersed... I'm up to 30 pushups per workout

13. Read "Circe" and submitted a discussion post that awarded me a shoutout via email from my professor and, subsequently, received so many kind words of encouragement and affirmation from my classmates

14. Cleaned my apartment - dishes done, floors clean, sheets changed, spiders that continuously spawn out of nowhere swept up

15. Watched Bones and All with Aliana and bonded over AAD " " ←

16. Submitted a topic proposal for my Renaissance class: "I am thinking of writing on Donne's Holy Sonnets for the paper. I am specifically interested in communion and how it is represented throughout. I think it would be interesting to track the shifts of Eucharistic imagery in Donne's work and see if it is clear how / if / when imagery that begins as transubstantial shifts to consubstantial." - he responded with: "Curiouser and curiouser!"... I am going to take that as a green light.

17. Had a nice meeting with the Chair of the English Department that was very encouraging

18. Attended an informal talk on the new Frankenstein movie that was cute and fun... "the Creature had awfully nice cheekbones..."

19. Read a bit about Bahktin's interpretation of Rabelais's "carnivalesque" - something that is wildly interesting however seems like it is a bit above what I can take on right now engagement wise

20. Am beginning to shift into reading about debates surrounding Eucharist matters in the 17th century for my paper and hopefully about to submit my last topic proposal for Ulysses

May seem like a lot, but in the whole scheme of what I need to be getting done it is very little. But I have to live a little too, you know? I have to breathe and YK and I had to eat those cookies. Today's agenda kind of went out the window. I had in my brain that I was going to get up early and write and get a head start on my "narrativity" paper that is due next week. I am going to write it in a way that after I submit it as a stand alone, I can then just rework it a bit and add it into my seminar paper. I have a section focused on the way Malory treats male wounds versus female wounds in Le Morte D'Arthur and a lot of it has to do with narrativity - some cauterize while some gape. So, anyways the plan was to get that done before my grandma gets here to visit tonight, but that didn't happen. Instead I woke up and made a choice (!) to eat leftover pizza for breakfast (bad choice) and then I cleaned my shower, put up a new shower liner, did some laundry, and went on a drive. I need to put coolant in my car. So while the drive was enjoyable, it was probably not the most responsible indulgence. K. I don't care. What's a girl gonna do? I went to a new Starbucks in Hollymead. Well, not new, just new to me. I wanted to drive somewhere I hadn't been yet and also have some extra time to listen to music in the car. I got my little (not little, it was a venti) shaken espresso and I went on a drive out in the country for a while. Get this, didn't even have to use the phone map. Yep. Chalk it up to my stellar sense of direction or just the fact that I am becoming more familiar with Charlottesville, but whichever it is, it was good.

Fall is so beautiful here. I didn't take any photos on my drive but I did take one when I woke up this morning. The trees outside of my window looked like they were on fire from the sunrise. Logan showed me pictures this week from a sunrise hike he did at Shenandoah. It was so beautiful - take the color in my picture and imagine it sprawled out over miles and miles of rolling mountains and trees. I love living in the mountains only because Virginia has my kind of mountains. I don't like the jagged mountains of the Rocky's and honestly some of the ranges within Appalachia are even too rugged for me. But the Blue Ridge are so beautiful and they're just soft enough that when I look at them it feels like I'm looking back at myself. When you look off in the distance, too, and they seem misty and blue it is just so beautiful. It's humbling, being surrounded by these living things that, while unforgiving, are so full of life and beauty. Indiana has that, too, in its own way. I love and miss its flatness and there is something about the endless cycle of planting, picking, and replanting the fields that is so beautiful. Both places have their thing and my heart lives in both. I meant to get a disposable camera to take photos of the trees so that I could put them in my scrapbook. It's a bit late now and I think I am just going to make it a point to do that next year. But I will be getting one for this summer so that when Saskia and I go to Rehoboth Beach or when Aliana and I go on a little trip somewhere I have it then. Maybe it's because I am healing or maybe this is just universally what it feels like when you encounter something new, but everything here is beautiful... even on the bad days. I took a few photos the other night on my walk home from class of the Lawn and the Rotunda. I'm so lucky to learn in a place that has existed for so many years.

Next up... God!

If you know me then you know that the last 8 or so years of my life have been devoid of any sort of religious focus. I initially wrote that sentence with the work "spiritual" in place of "religious", but I changed it because that's not necessarily true. While I rejected religion I was still spiritual. I was actively searching for things that fed my spirit and, honestly, had some fleeting success at finding small pieces of it in things other than God. I remember a conversation I had with Delaney a few years ago when I told her that I felt like I found my salvation in things like literature, poetry, and art. And while I do find pieces of myself in those things and they do feed my spirit, and they are not the same thing as salvation. Literature, poetry, art... these are all things that serve as scripts through which we experience the world, and then for us we absorb them and they become the way we practice. It is how we construct our interiority, but it's not something one can rest in. I think those things can be spiritual for all people; they certainly are for me. I guess it depends on whether or not you resonate with books, poems, songs, etc. but at the end of the day they are of the world - just an alternate way of experiencing the gravity of life, grief, love, and pain. I had so much of all of that in those 8 years. Some of the heaviest, lowest moments of my life happened: my parents' divorce, getting cheated on, mourning my childhood. Those things sustained me for a while, but they weren't fulfilling. It's a hard thing to try and explain. I felt full, but I also felt empty. I rejected God. I believed for a while that there was no God. And I abhorred religion (it sounds ugly, but that's what it was).

About a year ago when I truly, truly had hit rock bottom - despite having dug even deeper into my books and my writing in an attempt at soothing the pain - things started to happen to me that felt like quiet tapping against the thick concrete walls I had erected around myself. The walls were gorgeous - I'm sorry, but they were. They were adorned with Shelley's poetry, Shakespeare's drama, and Guadagnino's films. But they were cold and lifeless. While there is so much life in those things (they truly are living, breathing works) I guess I didn't realize (and I've never been able to articulate this until just now) that it was my life that was existing in there. My feelings, my pain, my grief, animating and reanimating the things I would write and read. Diving deeper into it only served as a mirror through which I could sit there and stare back at all of it. That's why the walls were so dead and cold. Because I was empty. The quiet tapping got louder, and somehow I began to notice that in my classes at a very secular university I was being assigned poems like "The Lamb" by William Blake and being asked to understand Frankenstein which, in turn, begs an understanding of Milton's Paradise Lost, which also requires an understanding of the nuances of Creation. Several people approached me on campus asking me questions about faith which had never happened to me in the 4 years I had been attending IU. Things like that, so very small, but so very important. Not without encouragement from Delaney, I attempted to pay attention to the tapping and so I went to church back in Bloomington for the first time in 8 years. I had gone to church at certain points here and there during that period, but I mean this time I really went to church. And you know what? The first sermon I heard was on Palm Sunday. If I was a better person I would be able to remember more of what the exact message was, but I know that it moved me to tears. I mean I was sitting there doing breathing exercises trying not to cry with my book bag / safety blanket propped up against the chair. (Of course I had to bring the book bag... if church failed, then in that bag I still had my walls right there with me.) The message directly corresponded to things I had been grappling with regarding leaving the abysmal relationship I was in. It also spoke to the anxiety I was having regarding moving to Virginia. Like I've said before - I wasn't even thinking about if I would get in to UVA (which is a terrible sign that something in my life was extremely wrong and disproportionate) I was just worried about what it would mean when I did get in and I was forced to leave behind that thing that I was clinging to so tightly.

Shortly after that I moved home for the summer. I continued to see God surface in things I was reading. I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which, essentially, is about a rejection of religion. It felt a little bit like a roman à clef except for I was the main character. And (shocker) that guy's life is empty. I got into UVA and sort of started to let myself toy with the idea that that nagging feeling of something being here for me that I expressed in my first blog post was actually maybe God just in a different form of tapping. Delaney gifted me a Bible. We started to identify all of these Things that were happening as things but things with a capital "T", because the amount of shame and uncomfortableness I felt surrounding stepping back into religion prevented me from really letting specific words come out of my mouth. Even now, I pray but I talk pray because the idea of closing my eyes and folding my hands before God feels like something I am too embarrassed to do. Not embarrassed to do it, just of myself. Writing this on here is a huge step for me. I have mentioned these things in extreme brevity amongst my friends and family, all because I'm not sure yet how to talk about it. Delaney is helping me talk about it. And she wants to talk with me about it. I would not have the confidence to be doing this right now if it weren't for her love and encouragement. (If you're reading this, I love you.)

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to something that referenced the verse in the Bible that talks about rejecting the ways of the world and bearing your Cross. The thing (whatever it was) that I was listening to was not religiously focused. It took me by surprise that this reference was even mentioned. I was in my living room or in my hallway or something when I heard it and I remember thinking that I should find that verse in the Bible and write it out so that I could tape it on my mirror in my bathroom (a practice that I adopted in those really low moments of last year). The verse really struck me even though, in practice, I feel like that is something I am really struggling with. To be candid, I feel attached to the world and rejecting it feels scary. I think that's normal and I am new at this, but it's something I am working on. What struck me most though was the image of bearing your Cross. My ekphrastic brain was thinking of the depth and power of that image. I got distracted and didn't end up writing it out to put on my mirror. I didn't really think much about it again until later that week when I went to go meet a friend for lunch.

On the way to said lunch I was sitting in traffic just listening to Spotify. This new song came on (killer song by the way) and the words took me back to that relationship - the one I am out of but still feel in the scars on my heart.

"I had a life that was real, but you took it all from me

I should have seen you were trouble, and I shouldn't have stayed

I've got a phantom pain that never fades away

I made a deal with the devil, but I never got paid 

You got a lot to gamble for a little bit more

And where the arrow leads, you never know

Hey, I'd better step outside and wait a while

I've got a heavy feelin' you could end my life

But I see what I'm becomin'

...you can watch me go"

I was on Barracks road, a road that when you are heading south is entirely uphill. I felt like I was being drug back into all of the pain. Not the hysterics of it all, but just a sad sort of remembrance of it as I sat there looking at the trees and the faces of everyone else as they sat in their cars. Will I ever feel a sense of belonging with another person? Will I be ever enough for someone? Both were questions flitting around in my mind (flitting because I try not to let them rest in there or I start to really get drug back). God was the furthest thing from my mind in that moment. And as the song finished up and, ironically, I had just closed my phone after sending the song to Delaney, around the corner heading south up the hill came two men bearing two full sized crosses - an enactment of the exact image that my brain had been so stuck on earlier in the week. They walked right beside my car and on the crosses it said: "Jesus loves you. You are enough." I turned the music off and I just started crying.

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?" -Matthew 16: 24-26

During those two lovely days at work that I mentioned earlier I also had another capital "T" Thing happen. We have to go back a bit though in order to understand fully just how crazy this was. A few weeks ago I was talking to YK and she shared with me this metaphor for grief that was super impactful. She likened it to a tree - essentially that grief never goes away but we continue to grow around it, never erasing it and never leaving it behind, but learning to coexist. I thought of one particular person in my life that I felt like could be encouraged or, at the least, comforted by this image and the next morning on my way back from the gym I decided to talk to God about her. I talked to God and I wrote her a letter. I also texted Delaney just asking her if she would pray for her too. I hadn't spoken to or heard from this person for a few months, and I never want her to feel invisible in her grief. I wrote the letter but did not send it that day. I didn't have her address on hand and I knew I was going to have to figure out some way to get it because, in this instance, the internet had failed me. Okay, so the next day I am at the gym and I receive a text from her (the person I had a letter waiting for on my table at home) after not having seen, spoken, or texted with her in months. Her text just said: "never forget how much I love you." And I have to believe. I have to believe that that was God. I hope she felt the love that I was sending her. I hope she felt it I hope she felt it I hope she felt it. She sent me her address and I mailed the letter to her this week. Okay, so going back to how this relates to my days at work. That Saturday I waited on a table of two girls who looked to be about my age. They were super nice, but other than them being extremely polite and understanding about our wings not having a buffalo sauce option, the interaction was very normal. I got them their food, they asked me to take a picture for them, and I went back at the end of their meal to cash them out. One of the girls asked me just as I was about to walk away: "Hey, can I ask you a question?" I said yes and then she went on to ask me: "Is there anything that I can pray about for you?" I immediately started crying. Not blubbering, okay? I kept it together, but immediately I felt like I was being wrecked by waves upon waves of recognition and love. I said yes, and I told her about the person I wrote the letter to. I asked her if she would pray for her too. She told me that she doesn't always ask people that question, but she felt like God was really telling her to ask me. Through this not only does my person now have people praying for her / talking to God for her in Lynchburg, Charlottesville, and Arizona, but it felt like another nudge and another tap. I also got invited to church by one of my coworkers and if you've ever worked in a restaurant then you know that that is about the last place on Earth you'd ever expect an invitation like that to come from.

Thanks for reading! I am looking forward to the holidays. If you don't hear from me for a while it is because of my 3 deadlines and 60 pages due within the next month. I'm scared but it's fine. And if you do hear from me, that might be just as bad because as much as I enjoyed writing this, parts of my soul know that I need to be spending this time elsewhere at the moment... crack open Le Morte D'Arthur, Olivia.

xx