Here comes a feeling you thought you'd forgotten.

In Twelfth Night, the social order comes undone--women fall in love with women, gender becomes malleable, nobles marry servants, servants imagine that they could become nobility. To parallel the end-of-Christmas festival after which it was named and at which it was performed, Shakespeare's play effects a mood of licensed disorder--and things get more than a little crazy.

Life mimics art. Not that our last day of classes (affectionately called LDOC by all those who care) is the same as Twelfth Night, but in a way it performed the same function: loosened everyone up, broke social customs, made everyone rethink friend circles and habits. People I knew in completely different ways found their way to my room and met each other and mingled, we played a stream of trashed up music, tried our best to stay in a comfortable stupor (difficult to maintain for more than five hours straight), etc. Rarely are so many people so willing to get completely messed up, and rarely do we all find ourselves so devoted to having a good time. In the end, I came out with new and unforeseen conceptions of everyone, of social relationships, of how life could be if only academic stress didn't interfere with the living of it.

And the effects have not worn off. Reading period has been a time drain: last night in the library until sun-up with hardly any work done (talking, instead, to good and new friends--rehashing the year in perspective), today four hours at dinner off-campus and bantering forever.

Now to study? But how could I? LDOC is still in the air and with it a sense of non-urgency. At the end of this journey, I feel very much the way I did at Oxford last summer--looking back on a period of my life with a vague sense of having grown in as-of-yet still inexplicable ways. But that time I was only able to construct the narrative months afterward (at the expense of having by that point already made a few missteps), and I hope I'll be a quicker study this time around.

Moments in time, once lost, now found.

Old stuff before new, I guess:

I
The pot roast was still too hot to eat when she told him and barely cold by the time he left, the door slamming shut behind his forgettable figure, suitcase dangling from one defeated arm.

II
Once I had thought, perhaps to comfort myself, perhaps to dull the ache that had taken up permanent residence inside my chest: “This will someday only be memory.”

Was it a lie? Or was it a convenience?

III
“If I don’t write it—,” she confessed, blowing a smoke ring that dissipated into the night air. “If I don’t write it, I’ll live it.”

IV
The idea was always to approach authentic emotion without falling victim to it, to caress it lovingly while stepping to one side of its paw-swipe. You don’t commit, you dodge the bloody aftermath—and you escape unscathed.

V
She did not pause to consider what she was doing, only to lick the postage stamp and to append it to her envelope in one smooth, savage motion.

“I know that my bluntness will not win me any favors with you,” she had written, in uncharacteristically shaky hand. “But this is no longer a game with winners and losers, is it?”

VI
Lesson Learned #554: Nothing is ever anything all the time.

VII
The author was found in his apartment on Saturday afternoon with paper cuts trailing in angry zigzags across his body, a pool of blood artistically red and sticky on his kitchen tiles. The sheets of his latest manuscript had been taped to his walls, a mysterious and haphazard homage to the New York Times Best Seller.

A funeral will be held a week from Sunday and will be open to the public.

VIII
Everyone knows—or assumes, at the very least—that Jane Austen fell in love with men before she fell in love with writing about them.

IX
No, I would not like to say more on the matter, thank you, thank you very much.

X
In high school, he’d been taught Jean-Paul Sartre and had found the Frenchman a delightful misanthropist. Hell is other people, hell is other people—until he graduated and realized how easy it is to jest, how difficult to tell one slightly crooked truth.

XI
“Hello there,” the Little Prince said to a very confused Pilot Saint Exupery. “Draw me a sheep, please.”

But the sheep the befuddled author drew were ghastly, each bent over in arthritic pain, each more malformed than the last, until he crumpled his paper in frustration and, flying off, disappeared into the cloudless sky.

XII
I wrote my deepest secrets on the soles of my feet and ran outside into the downpour.
I left the unspoken parts of me to be washed away, running in rivulets from puddle to puddle.

XIII
She snuck off into an abandoned field when it was nearly midnight and, giggling, slipped her shirt over her head. They laid in the grass, two unclothed figures visible only to themselves, swathed in darkness and a swarm of mosquitoes that they carelessly slapped from their skin.

In the morning, they would awaken and discover bites that blossomed pink and bumpy on their flesh—in between toes, on elbows, behind ears, in navels. The mosquitoes had left their traces everywhere, and in itchy absentia they continued to remind of shaky innocence and illegitimate friendship, until eventually the mosquito bites faded and with them the details of that night. Years later, the story would be reduced to myth, and only one of them would still believe that it had happened at all.

XIV
It was after all the record that would outlive the people who kept it,
the song that would outlive its bard,
the beauty that would outlive the artist.

XV*
In the beginning, he thought wildly, and attempted to catch his thoughts as they tumbled past him.

In the beginning was the gesture, and that gesture was: he opened his mouth to say it aloud, but too late—his face cracked into a crooked smile and the words died on his lips.

Always in my writing I want to express some vague understanding of emotional truth, but I find myself so scattered, so unable to control anything the way that the masters can. The subtlety, the intricacy, the very premeditation of it: not me. Perhaps one day I'll learn. Or I'll learn to fool people.

*borrowed from "The Fall Guy's Faith," by Robert Coover, published in Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton 2006).