Oberlin Commencement 1992

Waiting to start the procession

Hiromi and Vikki

I don't know why Amina hid her face when I walked by. If I didn't know better . . .

Love the beach balls.

If I didn't know better, Amina was looking sad because I was graduating. But I know better.

When I got up on the platform, one of the funnest things I've ever done was start snapping shots of the graduating class.

224 College St., Oberlin

Just a couple more days to graduation. Amina mentions she has a crush on someone. Careless comment. If she only knew. I hid the wrenching inside me and talked a lot to detach, gave her puppy love my blessing and after a while I even started feeling better.

I left her at a new downtown coffeeshop to go running. I jogged home, changed and stretched and hit the road at running pace. Not a smart idea since my knee still hasn't fully recovered from over-extending it doing a side-kick on the bag in the Asia House basement. I’ve been trying to nurse the knee up to strength and it’s been hard, but for some reason I have to run or I get antsy.

I didn’t care. Adrenalin was pumping from the moment I left the coffeeshop. I hit a stride and pushed to maintain it. I passed two discarded beer bottles and kept going, don’t stop. I headed off on a course that I considered my long course which I haven’t been able to do for a while. I arbitrarily decided to end in front of Old Barrows. Old B., Amina’s dorm. It suddenly became the most important run of my life and I couldn’t stop until I got to the end. When my knee started bothering me, I slowed down but pushed on. Then my ankles started aching and I started thinking about my shin-splints from high school track. They say you never get rid of shin-splints. Which is OK as long as you never lose the fire.

I believe in reciprocal, circular love. Loving yourself is the most important element of loving someone else. Selfishness as a form of giving. So why did I keep running after it started to really hurt? Some element is missing. In the sea of love, there are no shores. The only hope is to give up your life.

But not even Amina is crushing me, humbling me. Is she here to teach me something? I think I’ve missed the lesson. And as running goes, things come, things pass, things go. Time is paced and you don’t stop.

224 College St., Oberlin

What a fool. Somewhere in the back of my mind has always been the idea that Amina would somehow end up loving me. Somehow I had convinced myself that all our relationship appeared to be wasn’t true and her true feeling was that she wanted to be with me. Idiot. There is a solid chasm between us and it’s permanent and real, she hates men, and she’s never getting married. Accept the truth and close Amina out. I’ve always loved Amina and always wanted her. I don’t need to dwell on it now, just let it go.

Amina and I saw a movie, “Fried Green Tomatoes”, tonight. It was great. She liked it probably because the men are jerks and get duped. Women can do no wrong. I liked the metaphors of the train and the frozen lake as life and death.

224 College St., Oberlin

I’ve decided to stop drinking. In a moment, I had poured all the alcohol in my apartment down the drain. Alcohol had taken a symbolic position in my life, things ran in cycles and the times that I bottomed out and got smashed helped mark the cycles. I would plunge into life-threatening oblivion and wake up the next morning and find myself disappointed at still being alive.

At the same time I’d feel refreshed, I’d get on my feet and feel a sense of renewal. I could stand on my feet and it would feel so good that I was able to. I could be dead and I may still wish I had died, but I’m not, here I am, life goes on, start picking up the pieces of the previous night, day, or week. Go about my day and don’t let anyone know what had just happened. When things went too far, alcohol helped throw everything in the air so that things could resettle and restart.

But now I feel that alcohol has served its function. It helped me get through college and the type of stress college life brings, but that’s over. Now it’s life and alcohol is not going to help me function in life. I don’t need the anger it brings, not the depression, not the pain.

I was in bed and I couldn’t get to sleep, staring at the ceiling. I started thinking about every aspect of my life and everything in it. It was all so depressing. There wasn’t a single thing that didn’t frustrate me and seem futile. I realized that despite how real those stressors seemed, those feelings were being exacerbated by the alcohol that I had consumed earlier. The function alcohol served has ceased to be productive.

In a few days, my time at Oberlin will be over. It feels like it has been my whole life. Whatever happened before Oberlin is so inconsequential now. Everyone says “congratulations”, but I don’t see what’s the big deal. I didn’t have a choice in the matter, I was tracked into college, and completing the course work was inevitable. It wasn’t a huge challenge and I didn’t even find what I wanted to study until too late. Kind of a waste. But at least I got a lot out of the last year when I did study what I wanted to.

What I’ve studied hasn’t prepared me for the next step. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I’m directionless with only a vague plan to go to Japan and find something there. I keep fading between realities. Sometimes I feel that the symbolic world really is all of reality, which is where most human beings seem to be. Sometimes I feel that I’m missing many simple things that other people are able to get, and therefore they are able to get more out of what they are doing than I do. Sometimes I realize the impermanent nature of the symbolic world and that is the basis of truth, the beginning of a journey that I want to be on. And that is the perspective I feel I’m leaning towards, that the symbolic world isn’t all of reality, but only that - symbolic of a reality that we can’t touch with our limited knowledge of life, reality and existence.

224 College St., Oberlin

Dear Luyen,
You have been disappearing from my life for a long time on many different levels. I know I have been active in allowing you to not only distance, but really disappear. Nevertheless, I now feel the shocks of our imminent separation which saddens and frustrates me on various levels. These are shocks that are afraid of the change, afraid of the separation from you even though things between us have soured. Afraid because things hadn’t been resolved. Afraid because there will be no more chances or opportunities to work things out. We struggled with each other all semester and now it feels like we’ve failed to be what we wanted to be to each other.

Things changed. At one point we were perfect together and then we weren’t. Something happened, and something changed. I could have sworn that it was you who changed because at one point you were the best thing that ever happened to me, and then suddenly I had no idea who you were or what I was doing with you. But what happened between us so perfectly matches the patterns of my other relationships that I’ve begun to doubt myself and wonder if it was me.

It’s an identifiable pattern. Things would get uncomfortable, communication would break down, I would become extremely critical and deny that things could get better. Distance would fester and grow, relations would deteriorate, tension would build to a final separation and separating would be a big relief. I finally realized that it was me, that there was nothing wrong with the other person, and I promised that it would never happen again because I felt the pain it caused was a crime. Yet here I am again.

It’s too late for us to go back and be happy. Too much has happened. And with my future so boldly in front of me, I have no desire to have anything short of happiness attaching me to the States. I want to leave for good, and I wonder about what I take with me and what I leave behind. There was you who was always right there, fun, made me smile, made me happy. And there was you who rarely gave a decent greeting, somber and brooding, socially impossible, beyond recognition or familiarity.

How I want you to get well and work through all the issues that cloud your thoughts and feelings. How I wish you would at least acknowledge that I will only take the good memories, remember only that part of you. Is that really only half of the story? I want the Luyen from last semester back, even if we can’t get back together. I want the Luyen I loved back then. Not you, I don’t want you. That’s how much you’ve changed, but I know who you were back then is still somewhere there.

I know that the person you’ve become is who you are, and no doubt you like elements of who you are now. But the anger and resentment that has been accumulating this past semester is baggage that is too heavy, and I’m not going to carry it around with me, I’m not going to leave with it.

The time we had was too short. Part of me regrets not being able to be here longer and stick it out and see what develops with you and between us. But most of me will feel a heavy weight lifted. And I’m sorry about that, just as I’m sorry about the so many things that happened this semester. I’m sorry for what we became to each other last semester. I’m sorry we didn’t have a breakthrough, I’m sorry that I couldn’t be more supportive or insightful.

I know where you are because I’ve been there before and it took me a long time to get myself out. I doubt anyone else could have helped, it was something I had to do myself. Maybe that’s the case with you, and if anyone did try to help me, they would have gotten similarly burned. Maybe someone did, I don’t remember very well. The only reason why I know what I know now is because of what I went through. To think I could spare you the experience was probably naive.

I thought that you were my opportunity for penance for what I subjected people to when I was going through my problems. I thought that the way to make up for what I did was to help someone who is in a similar situation as I was in. I tried, I didn’t run away, I confronted you and tried to stay with you, but I still failed. And now I leave and can only hope that you will go home and be strong and confident. Listen to yourself, know yourself and who you really want to be.

224 College St., Oberlin

Luyen leaves in a week and I don’t know what she expects to happen after that. I don’t know if we’re in a relationship. I don’t think so. No one knows about it. We only interact when she comes over at night, and she often comes in after I’ve gone to sleep. It’s not right. I’m much closer to Diem and Amina and they hardly know of this thing with Luyen. It’s not right that we think we are any more than we are.

My trust has taken quite a beating. I don’t trust anyone. Not Diem, not Amina, not Frances. I don’t trust what they think of me or how they perceive me. And I doubt that any of them doesn’t have bad things to say about me now. I should have graduated in December. Once again I’ve overstayed my visit by just a little too long. Things have changed so much and too fast. People have grown up and grown apart. Grown different. I want to leave them all behind and forget about them.

224 College St., Oberlin

Luyen reminds me so much of myself and how I used to create my own hell. And like her, I was unable to get out of it. I couldn’t even recognize it. It was a long, slow, painful process to recognize it, decide I wanted to get out of it, and then create a reality in which I could. I still don’t know if I’ve succeeded. I do know that I don’t create hells for myself. Not unless I want to.

But this hell that she creates for herself is also hell for me. But I recognize that I allow it. I recognize now that I could have ended it with a word, and it might have helped her, too. Instead I ended up perpetuating it. But no one could have helped me through mine, I doubt I could have helped her through hers. Perhaps perpetuating it was the only way to help her see it.

May Fair pics

Amina, Diem

Oberlin Can Consortium:

The picture above was taken by one of them below:

Taken by me, during someone else's solo.


Amina


Diem, Amina