november.

it doesn't feel right to me that november is already here. september and october are my most fulfilling times of the year; being a september baby, i have always loved fall. but november is cold. living in chicago, november means preparing for a winter that won't end until mid-april, and i'm just not ready for that yet.

this semester i have put on weight. i have had to be careful with my body because my mind is under so much stress that my body literally can't handle any. i haven't even completely broken in my beautiful new doc martens because i can't stand even the idea of going through a few days of my feet hurting. i haven't had the downtime i've needed, so any time i drink a beer or take a hit, i spend hours freaking out that i wasted time when i could have been working or cleaning or getting my body back in shape. but i have been trying not to do that lately. i have fun when i can and roll with the punches when i need to, and somehow literally everything always works out okay. i've discovered that if i accidentally fall asleep and don't finish my work, the universe shifts a little and somehow there's time for me to finish my work in class (or on break) before i have to present, with absolutely no problem. somehow it all works out.

so i have felt really good about discovering that i can relax a little. (hence why i'm allowing myself to write this when i should be working.) but there's just some stuff i have to write down. because i've been working on this project about memory, i've been thrust back into processing stuff i should have processed a long time ago. and i know that i've written about this, so i'm not going to go through all of it again in this post. but last night i went to my friend kelsey's house, someone who has become a really great friend to me this semester. she's from boston (so of course she loves big d & beer) so we've been hanging out a lot. last weekend i met her boyfriend, patrick, who still lives in boston, and she asked me what i thought about him. i could sense an edge to her voice, as though she wanted us to tell her that he was just okay or something. i did like him, and i told her that, but he seemed incredibly needy and childish, whereas kelsey can be child-like in fun, but is actually really mature (i didn't tell her this.)

anyway, we were drinking and all got pretty drunk, and kelsey disappeared off to the bathroom for a really long time. the walls are thin in her apartment, and we could hear her sobbing on the phone with pat. she was devastated after he went back to boston, so we thought that's all she was crying about, but it turned out that pat had tried to kill himself in the past week and she has really been struggling. it was obvious when i saw them together that she loves him so dearly, and i was just immediately taken back to the night that everything broke between dylan and i. (god, i'm crying at my computer in starbucks right now.) and i just feel so bad for her, i want her to move in with me so i can make her cookies and cry with her and tell her that things don't really go back to how they used to be but that you are okay eventually, that it becomes a scar you keep but you don't see every day.

alea and i are going back over there today (kelsey is having a halloween party) with cookies a couple hours before the part starts so she can vent a bit. i got this wonderful poem book by clemetine von radics yesterday that i'm going to let her borrow in hopes that it will help her process.

anyways, i don't have a way to end this post. november is always so hard on me, but i'm hoping that by being there for kelsey this november, maybe it won't be. that things can start to close and heal again. i know that this timing is kismet; i don't believe in fate or whatever, but i do believe that my choice to get hurt this way in this life lines up to help other people, that being forced to process this right now is supposed to line up with her life so i can be there for her, and that kelsey came into my life for a reason. you just have those feelings about certain people.