The fact that he can sleep in this 9′x12′ is in its own small way a miracle, as the space is a tiny box of chaos. Some hooded dude in sweat pants is sitting at the desk rolling a blunt, four high-heeled girls by the door are on round three of shots in as many minutes, the bearded nonbeing is trying to make a phone call in the corner, and as I sit on the bed tickling this komodo dragon, a guy (who introduces himself as Kyle) begins to pitch to me a Bud Light commercial. It involves werewolves and “sorority bitches in bikinis.” I tell him it sounds great. He shakes my hand and suggests we do a shot. Sure Kyle. Why not.

The Captain Morgan goes down easy, even though I hate rum. I never chase. It’s not an act of bravado, but more of an embracing of the burn and what it signifies — it’s a conscious reminder of what I’m choosing to do, and tonight, it’s a reminder that perhaps I shouldn’t do it again. I can’t be hungover tomorrow. It’s the last night, and I don’t know whose room this is, but he’s gonna have a good time cleaning in a few hours. The desk is covered with partially filled beer bottles and cans and liquor bottles and shot glasses and pong balls and dutch wrappers. They tremble, and at first I think my lubricated brain is fabricating their subtle shaking, but then I realize that I can feel the subwoofer through the bed — FlyLo is pumping, only barely drowning out the sound of M.I.A. playing a cash register in the living room.

I wander away from my lizard friend and join the party again. I find my people friends dancing on tables with wings on their feet, their heavy hearts temporarily lightened like helium balloons cut free from mailboxes. I know them only by their silhouettes against the soft light falling from the paper lantern hanging in the corner. No one stands still — everyone is beyond caring about their outfit, their hair, their make up, and everyone sweats together in a nonstop orgy of untethered joy one last time.

I slip outside onto the balcony for a breath of fresh air, and by “fresh” I mean “smoke filled.” I don’t care — can’t. Don’t know how any more. The cool mountain air feels good against my damp skin, and the faces leaning against the brick wall are just as refreshing. Everyone’s chillin’, chatting coolly about how fucked they are. “The REAL WORLD, man. Fuckin’ SCARY.” I find myself thinking about how I don’t really give a shit — they might have to go out and be adults, and that sucks and all, but I’m going to have to be here without them. They’re leaving me behind.

But that’s what happens, right? We are kinetic beings. We move in different directions, at times unpredictably, chasing down some kind of happiness we aren’t sure how to attain. We all know we’ll never be happy again in the way we’re happy now, and we’ll never be together in the same way, but when it’s all over — and it does end — we all go looking to replace this hedonistic pleasure however we can, until we’re satisfied with what pleasures we learn can be more deeply satisfying if we let them be.

I don’t want to think like this right now. I go back inside. Weave my way through the dance party, resisting as my friends try to pull me in and rock out to MJ. Pass the pot smokers in the bathroom, who are mingling with those girls on line who always complain that, “oh my god, I can’t wait any more,” and those other girls who always insist on running the sink tap while they pee. (I never understood that.) I retrace my steps back down the hall.

The bedroom’s empty now. FlyLo’s been replaced, oddly enough, with The Decemberists — “The Bagman’s Gambit.” “No, they cannot catch me now. We will escape somehow, somehow.” I curl back up in a corner of the bed with my lizard friend. I feel bad for abandoning him earlier, knowing how badly I feel at the thought that tomorrow, my friends abandon me. The drunken romantic in me considers the night to be the end of an era, but in a way, it feels like any other night — a dream melted into a dream, encapsulated by the fog of another dream. A number of people wander past the room, looking for someone or another, but no one stays. I’m glad. For the moment, choosing to be alone in the crowd with none but a sleeping lizard feels good. “With the wave of an arm, you were there and gone.“

It’s hard, isn’t it? It’s so much work, wellness. It requires a considerable amount of conscious effort to eat properly, exercise regularly, sleep enough and at normal hours, and balance work with play, sociability with solitude, making a life with living. And let’s real here: at this point in our lives, it takes a lot to really WANT wellness.

In a way, we love our depression. We love the lows because they allow us the highs. We indulge in the bitching and whining and moping, so we can indulge in the hedonistic pleasures that allow us to block all that out. In a way, it’s so you have an excuse. It’s actively making bad decisions. It’s staying out late and drinking too much and sleeping too little last night so you can say, “This is why I was unproductive today.” You know it’s poor reasoning, but it’s an explanation nonetheless.

But it’s nothing more than that, either: it’s only an explanation. It’s not a legitimate excuse. I find myself, lately, trying to convince myself that I’m working hard to get better in mind and body and emotions, but I only half believe it. It’s not that I don’t WANT to feel better. I don’t want to be so depressed, so unhealthy. But I also don’t want to lose the joy of the highs that have helped me survive the last few years. I don’t want the responsibility of taking care of myself, when it’s so much easier to neglect myself and my life in favor of other things.

I claim to want balance, but if I’m being honest, I can admit that I don’t truly want to work for it, and I don’t want to lose the comfort of having a built-in explanation for my portfolio of failures. Being unwell is a way of stunting growth, isn’t it? And refusing to cease being unwell is a way of refusing to grow. It’s stubborn and petulant and child-like, a Peter Pan-esque denial of maturity. I don’t know how to shake it — how does one learn to want to care for herself, to want to be taken care of? How do you learn to let go of the masochistic pleasures of unwellness, and desire what you know is best?

few streetlights, fewer traffic lights.
I can’t seem to speak.
my speakers are broken.

bbbzzzzZZZZzzz, in stereo
until we hit another pothole

– silence.
time slows.

shy mind too content to spoil with words
a straight and steady road unwavering,
I round a blind internal curve and wait, impatient.

my eyes roll over miles of moon shadowed fields,
trained away from you, framed within frames,
for fear I won’t see what I feel.

and now the window falls, escape wisps
of silver, sparks red, sparks of energy invisible –
microscopic specks from our small cosmos, fleeing.

time folds in, a soft and stifling linen sheet,
the end of a wave rushing to reach the crest

– trapped.
it catches us

me with one hand on the wheel, twirling my hair
to keep my spare hand from straying out of my chaos
into yours, and you, turned away.

High Holborn proved to be a classy, business-minded street akin to, say, 68th St on the UES — not exactly Madison or Park Ave itself, but not far from it — fewer hustling, less bustling. It was around 7pm, and Working Folks were leaving Work. Working Folks tend to make for poor people watching in my mind, since they look so much the same, and as I made my way to the tube station, I dodged and wove with the best of ‘em — countless skinny women in sleek heeled boots and coats perfectly cut in trendy makeovers of classic fashions, and even more men in neatly tucked knit scarves and flawlessly tailored jackets. Even though the day was through and the wind rough, most of the women still sported perfectly coiffeured ‘dos, and the men weren’t even so much as rumpled.

As I attempted to glide with and around them, their faces blurred before me like bitter fruits blended into a bad smoothie. Slowly, I began to distinguish one from another, and realized that the difficulty in doing so lay in the fact that within their aesthetic perfection, they all seemed to wear an identical mask of discontent — stern, pursed lipped frowns; tightly knit eyebrows; distracted eyes that sometimes strayed into abstraction. I see them every day in Westminster and Waterloo– in handfuls on the Strand, in waves on streets like High Holborn — yet, there’s always something sorrowful about seeing so many seemingly unhappy anonymous at once.

Tonight, I began trying to look in each person’s eyes as I passed, whether they were leaving an office building with a briefcase or M&S with a sandwich they called supper. I wondered if they all have similar stories to match their similar expressions of discontent, and I found the idea that so many people could stand facing middle age unhappily for all the same reasons to be petrifying. In an instant, I dropped my glance and their faces began to blur again, until I could no longer discern their misery. Perhaps, at times like these, it’s best to let strangers remain strangers.

My favorite spot at South Bank, Gabriel’s Wharf, feels a little too desolate and unstable at night for my liking; instead I go in the opposite direction toward Westminster Bridge. During the day, this area is jam packed with too many people. At night, it feels like mine. I go down past the big black book-filled bins of the South Bank Book Market, the graffitied skate park, Festival Pier. Past the restaurants at Royal Festival Hall and Foyle’s book store. Under the Jubilee Bridge, where the trains pass from Waterloo to Charing Cross and beyond.

There are trees here. Not a whole lot of them, but there are trees nonetheless. And benches of all kinds; I love benches. Beside these trees and benches, a few of the inlaid stones that pave the walkway have inscriptions on them. All contain bits of poetry in block capitals, mostly about rivers. Between the Jubilee Bridge and the London Eye is my favorite one, with lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.

I stand there and reread this several times, breathing the words in and out.

Then, sometimes, I keep walking past the Eye, and stop at the benches near the London Aquarium. I sit, or lean on the massive stone parapet, and look at Parliament and Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, all lit up, golden and green and glowing. Electric lights are marvelous. The sound of the gentle rivertide of the Thames beating against the boats and the embankment let me pretend I’m home on the pier in Island Heights, if I so choose. It’s something I can depend on always being there – the lights, the water – it’s an anchor.

Sometimes I wish someone was with me to share the simple beauty of these moments. Sometimes I am glad I am alone.

I went a little earlier than is my habit tonight. There was a man standing beneath the Eye in the halo of its dimly purplish lights with an acoustic guitar, a mic, and a small amp. As I passed him the first time, he stood there, in a cowboy hat and denim jacket, singing “Stand By Me” with a lady friend. On my way back, he was crooning “Hotel California” by himself, to virtually no one.

I wonder if he is happy.

Nothing lasts forever. Everything is ever ephemeral and sweeter for being so. People, places, things, ideas, and the connections among them all – everything will be reduced to nothing, if you wait around long enough for it to happen. Stability is a farcical figment of our imaginations; it really is laughable, the way we create and destroy ideas of certainty on whims stemming from the abstract, masked as the concrete. True certainty doesn’t exist, no matter how much we want it to exist, unless we imagine it into being.

Summer is rapidly drawing to a close, and in the season’s twilight, the days are already growing darker earlier, and the night air dares, at times, to be brisk. We’ve again become comfortable with living through the sweaty, brutally hot days for the damp, shallow nights that somehow last forever, and even though this changing of the guard has been occurring gradually, it feels like it has tiptoed from behind and caught us unawares. The change in season is as inevitable as every other change, and now they’re breaking upon us in waves.

I have somehow managed to take everything that has happened in these three months, and blur it together into a single vague memory of bars and parking lots and backyards, of the boardwalk and car rides and basements. People and things and words that have made me terribly angry or terribly happy seem far away, enshrouded in a cloud of cigarette smoke, enveloped in the pervasive stench of cheap beer. It has all become so much less important than it seemed in the moment. Everything feels like it’s slipping through my fingers – not as smoothly as sand, but it is slipping nonetheless.

I know I shouldn’t try to hold on to this tangled braid of memories, but under the influence of unwavering uncertainty, my instinct is to try to unravel the mess, and put each section into a separate compartment in my mind. There isn’t much to work with. I haven’t written much this summer. I haven’t taken very many pictures, at all. I haven’t spent much time trying to hold on. Without these constructs to keep my mind organized, it seems my mental space is as much of a mess as my physical living space, and I can’t see clearly.

I hate when this happens – when my life feels cluttered and with too many things and people and feelings and memories and I don’t know what to do with it all. Usually I write and organize and find spaces for everything, assigning meaning and trying to make those meanings permanent. Usually I’m afraid to let the good things go, and simply can’t let go of the bad. I’m afraid of forgetting. Sometimes, though, I just want to wipe it all out and start with a clean slate. I know no one can have a tabula rasa, that everything is with us always. And I know I shouldn’t want it to be any other way. But at times like this, I think it might be nice.

Today is the summer solstice and in the cozy, rosy room that I let occupy the majority of the active space in my mind, that means today is the symbolic beginning of the most joyful time of year. The vernal equinox may prompt the rebirth of everything green, but in summer, life reaches its apex. For whatever reasons (and the pit of my stomach reminds me that there are several) I don’t feel the exuberance I seem to think I should. Summer is fullness. Summer is dog days of unexamined joie de vivre. Summer is the gift of Time for recuperation from the year past, for the celebration of now, for the pursuit of Greater Things. But at this moment, I only feel an empty uneasiness at the thought of the next 3 months, and the potential they have to either fly like the flap of an insect’s wings, or drag like an unwilling child’s heels through dirt.

The disconnect between my rational brain and my irrational everything else seems especially harsh lately, as though I am being punished for wanting to distinguish between the two. Perhaps I am. I find myself, and those around me, constantly acting against their better judgement, in ways of various magnitudes. The more I think about it, the more I think about Joan Didion’s memory of being twenty-eight: “That was the year…when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it.”

I can’t tell what part of me wants to believe that this summer doesn’t count, but I do want to believe it, wholly and fully. It doesn’t feel like the apex of life – it feels like a season of transition, signifying change of overwhelming proportions. I am troubled by the nagging belief that I am not adapting as well as I can. I am capable of acting like the adult I know I now technically am, but instead choose to hide in the humid summer heat, letting a haze of mediocrity envelope me. I can feel this lack of motivation maturing into slothfulness at an alarming rate, and it’s terrifying.

But then, everything is. I see all the options, all the decisions that demand to be made, and I don’t want to make them. I suppose no one really does. But now, I am vaguely conscious at all times that every choice matters. Everywhere I turn it seems I see nothing but duality: two parts struggling for balance, for control. I want that balance, and all the beauty of life that balance indicates. But I don’t know how to make the choices that will lead to it.

I should probably stop thinking and just do it. Whatever “it” may be.

1. Time to Pretend
MGMT – Oracular Spectacular

I guess this meant to be ironic since it’s the bkhipsterkings we’re talkin’ about here, but I also guess it’s up to you to decide whether or not you want to interpret it that way. …I like to consider it both ways. “This is our decision to live fast and die young – we’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun! Yeah it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do? Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?”

2. After Hours
We Are Scientists – After Hours (Single)

My favorite to listen to as I’m getting ready to go out at 11pm and stay out til sunrise. “We’re all right where we’re supposed to be. Time means nothing. Say that you’ll stay.”

3. Blankest Year
Nada Surf – The Weight is a Gift

I don’t know why this isn’t my friends’ anthem: “Oh, fuck it. I’m gonna have a party.”

4. Come Around
Counting Crows – Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings

Not a huge fan of the latest CC album, but I dig this tune, and it makes me think of holding on and moving forward at the same time. “It’s one of the reasons when we say goodbye, we’ll still come around.”

5. Only the Good Die Young
Billy Joel – Greatest Hits Vol. I

Cliché but I had to.

6. Float On
Modest Mouse – Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Also kind of a cliché I guess but whatever. It’s something everyone should remember. “Even if things end up a bit too heavy, we’ll all float on, all right.”

7. Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus – The Airing of Grievances

The band of a dude who graduated here in ’08 and “made it” in the real world, AND a Shakespeare reference = double win. “And there’ll be no more cigarettes, no more having sex, no more drinking ’til you fall on the floor…you better watch where you run your mouth, ’cause you know what they’ll say to you. They’ll say, YOUR LIFE IS OVER…”

8. Flying Model Rockets
The Front Bottoms – The Front Bottoms 2.0

My senior year wouldn’t have been the same without numerous live performances by these guys. At least, I don’t think it would have been the same. “Look at our plans, try to understand, what could have happened to all of them?”

9. Sleepyhead
Passion Pit – Manners (or Chunk of Change EP if you wanna be a purist.)

A dance party staple this year that spread like wildfire, with a wonderful line at the end of the first verse: “You were one inch from the edge of this bed. I dragged you back, a sleepyhead…”

10. Sweet Disposition
The Temper Trap – Conditions

Okay, (500) Days of Summer was one of my favorite movies of last year. I watched it a lot with my friends this semester, and the soundtrack has been a constant companion of mine since last September. This song instantly became one of my favorite tracks, and I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: it makes me nostalgic for things that never happened, as well as for things that have. “So stay there, ’cause I’ll be coming over while our blood’s still young, so young, it runs, and we won’t stop ’til it’s over, won’t stop to surrender.”

11. Let Go
Frou Frou – Details

“It’s all right, ’cause there’s beauty in the breakdown.” Mad snaps to the Garden State soundtrack. If there’s a single film of the past 10 years that manages to convey (if indulgently) the twenty-something angst, the quarter-life crisis, the post-grad-confusion, this is it.

12. Empire Ants (ft. Little Dragon)
Gorillaz – Plastic Beach

One word: Georgia. More words: a stand-out track on a great album with haunting synths and lovely dreaminess: “And if the whole world is crashing down, fall through space, out of mind with me, where the emptiness we leave behind on warm air rising blows all the shadows far away…”

13. Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean
Paul Simon – Surprise

In this, our moment of crisis, another clearly-defined time of transition, Paul Simon delivers empathy with every word: “Outta here, when am I gonna get outta here? And when will I cash in my lottery ticket, and bury my past with my burdens and strife? I want to shake every limb in the garden of Eden, and make every lover the love of my life. I figure that once upon a time I was an ocean, but now I’m a mountain range: something unstoppable set into motion. Nothing is different, but everything’s changed.”

14. There Goes the Fear
Doves – The Last Broadcast

I made a video of mah friendz to this song. It’s energetic but a bit nostalgic at the same time. “You turn around and life’s passed you by. You look to ones you love to ask them why…Think of me when you’re coming down, but don’t look back when leaving town today…”

15. Stillness is the Move
Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca

One of the lightest, happiest, most joyous songs I’ve heard in the past year. A declaration of faith that reminds us that we still have so much to celebrate! “Isn’t life under the sun just a crazy, crazy, crazy dream?”

16. Last Words
The Real Tuesday Weld – The London Book of the Dead

“So we sat by the laundromat with magazines and cigarettes and talked about a million other things.” Countless nights spent similarly to this, even though I don’t smoke. I wouldn’t trade ‘em for the world.

17. Home
Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes – Up from Below

“Laugh until we think we’ll die, barefoot on a summer night – nothin’ new is sweeter than with you…Home is whenever I’m with you.” Thanks #5bee.

18. Jesus, Etc.
Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Dear Friends: “Don’t cry. You can rely on me, honey. You can come by any time you want. I’ll be around. You were right about the stars – each one is a setting sun.” Love, Me.

19. Bridge Over Troubled Water
Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water

The postscript. More cliché but I don’t care. I wanted something from The Graduate, but any S&G is enough for me, and this felt more applicable. Somehow “Mrs. Robinson” just wasn’t grand enough to place here. “Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way.” <3

Honorable Mentions: These are songs I wanted to add, but they just didn’t make the cut. I highly suggest you check ‘em out anyway.

• You’ve Got the Love – Florence + the Machine – Lungs
• We Are Birds – Chris Ayer – This is the Place
• To Kingdom Come – Passion Pit – Manners
• Part of Corey – Akron/Family – Akron/Family
• I’ll Be on the Water – Akron/Family – Akron/Family
• Be Here Now – Ray LaMontagne – Till the Sun Turns Black
• This is the Time – Billy Joel – The Bridge
• Stop This Train – John Mayer – Continuum
• Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough – Michael Jackson – Number Ones
• This Will Be Our Year – The Zombies – Odessey and Oracle
• Just in Time – Nina Simone – Nina Simone: The Tomato Collection
• My Girls – Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

For the retrospective, MoMA is displaying some of her sculptures, videos of her original performance pieces – she was really big in the ’70s – and they’re featuring contemporary performers recreating some of her past work. Abramović herself is also performing there currently. She sits at a table in the middle of an open atrium, and one by one, viewers sit in front of her at the table and capture her gaze. By the end of the exhibition, it has been calculated that she will have sat and stared – performed – for over 716 hours.

In one of her previous performances, Abramović took this medication given to patients in a catatonic state while perfectly healthy. It sent her into convulsions, and for 15 minutes, she had no control over her body. In another, with her long-time collaborator Ulay, she held a bow while he held an arrow drawn taut, aimed directly at her heart. They stood with their feet close to the other’s and each leaned back, and the longer they stood there, the more rapidly their hearts would beat. That steadily increasing tension that existed both physically and abstractly between them, that total and complete trust, defined the performance.

It may not make sense, and it may sound really strange, but the whole experience is intensely moving. I wish I’d gotten to take part in her current performance, sitting at the table. Abramović forces the audience to consider her performance outside their realm of comfort, to consider their relationship to her, to consider the moment – she challenges the viewer as well as herself. I’ve never experienced anything, any art, remotely like this – I definitely think anyone with any interest in any kind of art should go. Everyone in general should go. I want to go back. The exhibit ends May 31.

(If you can’t go, at least check out the live feed of Abramović’s current performance during museum hours, and this NYT slideshow.)