for the first morning since arriving in this country i didn’t have to get up at 8. when my alarm went off at 10, i lay in bed, refreshed after a full night’s sleep, staring out at a swept blue sky, and didn’t want to move. just lay there, not particularly warm or comfortable or happy, just there. didn’t want to get up.
i shouldn’t have.
not that today was bad. got tickets for less than $20 to see carmen at the royal opera on february 11 with drea, sam, katie, and mel. went to a lecture on the state of the european union. had a fabled only-served-on-wednesday pastry. toured the carlsberg brewery. saw moulin rouge with drea and mel. hot chocolated afterwards with drea.
a persistent knot of tension in my shoulders refuses to be drunk, willed, or filmed away. during moulin rouge, while enraptured at some moments and crying at others, i couldn’t relax. external details bothered me: what a decrepit state he’s left in, how in all these movies the sought-after heroine dies because that’s the only way a man can truly posess her, my own jealousy. (the movie itself is much better than i expected, incidentally. heavy-handed, over the top, and with a plot that must have been played out a record 27,000,000 times but very well-acted and balanced out with tongue-in-cheek humor and elbow-in-the-ribs popculture references, as though baz himself were sitting right next to you cheerfully munching away on popcorn and sayin, ‘i know this is ridiculous but damn, ain’t it fun?’)
afterwards at hot chokolade i needed to release pressure. she’s wonderful she would have listened but We Don’t Know Each Other at least not yet, not really she’s so nice she says ‘heck’ and i guessed what she was going to say before she said it. i couldn’t i wanted someone i knew, someone i could be unreasonable with. i’m just upset, i guess. i don’t like beer, i haven’t been to the opera enough for the prospect of it to thrill me, i resent movies that portray more exciting lives than mine, and most of all i miss having the people i love around me. too much thinking, too much living in my head. it’s tiring.
and tomorrow classes start.