If there's one thing for which I am grateful, it is that things change. I don't know if things change on a cosmic, eternal level – if universes run in loops or existence is an endless stream of conscious and unconscious – but things change in an individual lifespan from an individual perspective, with no regard for the individual's views on the matter. This concept has a number of names, depending on how it is perceived. Sometimes it is called Hope.
The galaxies spiral away from each other and back again. Things change, more or less. And so unto eternity. But forever is pretty big, so we break off chunks of it to look at it better. These chunks have a number of names too, all of them equally valid. And sometimes they are called Stories.
The thing about a story is that it ends; in fact, the ending is the most important part. I would mention at this point something about that being the fundamental difference between eternity and bits of eternity, and thereby try to justify my lack of a fitting close for this fragmented look at high school life, but I don't think I'd even be ready to end a story just yet. (As evidenced by the fact that I never really have ended a story just yet.)
To tell the truth, I'm not convinced we've even made it to the prologue. If the grand symphony is about to begin, this blog has been about the people who come in beforehand and set up chairs, or fold programs, and the band that's warming up backstage, and the first members of the audience coming in from the snow. Because in my mind, it is very often a certain kind of grey, cold, still day that happens sometimes near the end of November, a day like a blank canvas or an empty page, vibrating with lyrical possibility.
Despite gratuitous romanticism and rambling, I don't mean for you to imagine my eyes glittering with sentimental tears as you read these lines. By now, you've probably figured out that I'm a closet optimist, but we can both pretend that we don't know anything about that, and I can keep on playing the cynic for a few more paragraphs.
I won't claim to be ecstatic about everything in my life at this point. I'm still a little bored. I'm still a little needlessly sad. I'm still all the things I have ever been, though some parts of me express themselves in different ways now, and will (I always hope) continue to shift as my world does. But the landscape of my life has developed in interesting ways since April of 2006, and I – like my old friends the trees – have been shaped by the storms I have endured, however trivial those storms have seemed.
So what now. To tell the truth, I'm not sure. I'm never sure. I'm never good at keeping my fingers silent for long, either, so perhaps I will be continuing my legacy of rambling at another address in the near future. Should that happen, I will post the link in the sidebar here, because I've chosen to keep the RFS archives open a little longer. Should that not happen, I am quite confident that other things will.
I've been writing this post for the past two hours. It isn't the twenty-sixth anymore, really, but that's a pretty good date to go out on, so it can stay. And now, my friends, I draw the curtains closed, or throw them open. In doing so, I bid farewell to a more youthful time – not to my friends from that time, but to my past self. I'll make sure to visit her now and then, but we aren't bound together anymore, and we can go our separate ways.
And first of all things, my own separate way leads me back to the concert hall, where the orchestra has begun filing in, and the percussionists are setting up, and the room falls silent as all eyes face forward. You can see it too, can't you? The rapid whispers of pages turning, finely formed fingers resting on finely carved fingerboards, dark-robed profiles illuminated from above. (Like a dream. The waves roll in and out.) In a moment the violins will begin tuning, followed by the dark melodious clarinets; the crystalline tones of the horns; the cello's sensual, melancholy voice; and the glorious bass. Then the conductor comes out, and then we play for awhile before the concert ends.
After all, the eternal music will eventually change, more or less. And no individual chunk of time lasts forever, except perhaps as part of an endless stream of conscious and unconscious, where universes, among other things, run in loops.
I feel pretty peaceful about it.
