Homecoming
I miss the energy. The companionship. The routine. I miss the rah rah school spirit and the constant activity and the sense that I was always accomplishing something (seemingly) important.
I miss the energy. The companionship. The routine. I miss the rah rah school spirit and the constant activity and the sense that I was always accomplishing something (seemingly) important.
Somehow, years before, I’d put myself in a box. I could either be pretty or a bad-ass soccer player, not both, and it was obvious which the superior choice was.
In English, I am precise and quick with words. In Arabic, I am earnest and confused, funny not because of wit but because I am fumbling a language everyone else understands.
If you’re someone who doesn’t like to help people, who is selfish, and who is like me, you hate reading this stuff. “SO what, Bart? Make me feel bad for walking past a homeless person?
To be honest, I’m not even that big a fan of his music. But here is the thing about Andrew W.K.—he is such a relentlessly positive person that you can’t help but love him.
I invite him up to my apartment after our french toast so he can tell me if our apartment is crooked. (Water spilled last week and began running swiftly towards the front door.) It is.
But this is efficient, I tell myself. Hot food requires a stove, and a stove requires money, and I am a sophomore trying to backpack Europe on a budget. Food seemed like the best place to cut corners.
As a student, especially as a student new to this community, this is a fast-evolving and confusing situation to be caught up in. I feel the need to guard what I say and be very careful with my words.
Somehow in the concision of this story, Kafka manages to touch eternity and in doing so touch what has always, since childhood, freaked me out about eternity.
Elena’s need for the “dazzling, terrible” Lila is so powerful that it can be felt in the writing: if some parts of the novels drag, it is because Elena, without Lila, is herself dragging.