This is my second Christmas break from college experience where I have to say goodbye to people I spend all my time with for about a month. I remember it being hard last year, but this year it has an extra-special heart-wrenching quality. Kristen came to visit this weekend, and today she and Rebecca both left. It's so weird to think that neither of them will be a part of my next semester at Belmont. Of course, they will both still be my friends, and we'll keep in touch, but I haven't fully grasped the concept of neither of them being around and in the next room anymore.
This is a somewhat surreal experience, but I know it will all be okay. Kristen is coming back, and Rebecca has not escaped our friendship! Now we just have to make a little more effort. I hope you two know how much you mean to me and how much I've enjoyed living near you guys and hanging out for a year and a half. Don't forget about me when you're on SNL and working for a record label. Come get your coffee from my Starbucks every now and then!
And this poem is heavy on the romance, but I feel like it has some relevance here because space can be overcome.
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
by John Donne
by John Donne
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
'Twere profanation of our joys,
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant.
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love, so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
'Twere profanation of our joys,
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant.
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love, so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.
You guys have been the highlight of my college experience so far.
