The downstairs of my house is scary at night after everyone has gone to bed. There is a clock ticking that I have never noticed before, and the ceiling fan is casting shadows on my face and the walls. The room I am sitting in is painted forest green and has golf memorabilia all over the walls and bookcase and my brother’s and my Senior pictures are on the top shelf. I really hate that picture of me. At my school in Virginia, we had to wear “drapes,” those black, off-the-shoulder, velvet things that Sororities wear in their formal pictures at Otterbein. Plus, my eyebrows look horrible.

I am listening to Wilco.
in the beginning
we closed our eyes
whenever we kissed
we were suprised
to find so much inside.

Virginia has been on my mind lately. I recently came across all of my old paper journals and I’ve been reading them in bed before I go to sleep. I have over twenty of them, starting from sixth grade up until now, completely filled with drawings and photos and dreams and crushes. They are fun to read because many of the people and stories probably would have been forgotten about if I hadn’t taken the time to write every day. The past few nights I’ve been reading the Virginia ones.

Basically, my Junior year sucked. I had just moved. I was having trouble adjusting. But senior year was pretty alright because of the four guys I met who became my best friends while I was there. Johnny, Allen, Andras and Martin. Johnny and Allen had been best friends since forever, and Andras was from Budapest and Martin was from Germany. I have all these sweet memories… making films with them, sitting on my roof late at night, going to DC for concerts, climbing hay bales at their art teacher’s house, getting all dressed up for the Gold Cup, paddle-boating around a lake, late at night, looking at the stars.

I was pretty devastated after we graduated and we all went our separate ways — I moved back to Ohio, Allen went to Georgia, and Martin and Andras went back to Europe. But we had decided that we would reunite that Christmas in Europe. And we did. Which I still think is pretty amazing. We did so many awesome things and dumb things and I will never forget it. I have this one particular memory of being at the top of this fortress on a hill in Budapest and being the coldest I’d ever been, throwing snow balls at the passing cars on the road right below. And missing and hitting a little boy in the head. His parents looked so angry. We laughed so hard.

I miss them.
I’m pretty sure Allen is coming up for my wedding, which is pretty awesome.

It is late and I went to bed hours ago and I couldn’t fall back to sleep.
I guess I should try again.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 11:15 pm and is filed under traveling, virginia is for lovers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.