too late.

It's the evenings where it hits me the worst.

I play my itunes playlist on shuffle as soon as I walk in the door -- quiet rooms make me uncomfortable -- and turn on the warm light of the Ikea lamp given to me by my bosses, and settle in to e-mail and web catch-up. I'm surprised at how happy I am to come home to my small space that I disdainfully referred to as my "stalinist hovel" when i first moved in, but now it's growing on me. It's tiny, shabby, and quiet, but at least it's private and all my own.

It's where it turns around midnight that I should fall into bed sensibly, as I have to wake up around 7 for work, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Turning off the computer and the music means being alone with myself in bed, alone with my thoughts, my loneliness, my silence, my missing, the desolate slams of doors revolving around my room.

I have, though, been enjoying my days immensely. Work, class readings, seminars, and lately, friends have been keeping me busy. I had a wonderful weekend filled with yoga & pubs & new classmate friends & the Rugby World Cup (England lost, i barely watched, and incited heady gasps all around me when I asked what a scrim is. (It's a scrum, and apparently it's blasphemous to ask that kind of ridiculous question)), long talks over tea, and walks around Camden.




Today I slept in for the first time since I've been here, no alarm. I went to the UCL library and felt that thrilling rush I always feel when surrounded by shelves upon shelves of books. I even ran across two books, on two completely separate ends of the Literature section, authored by a professor I had at ASU. He taught a class I took on the bildungsroman in 20th century Irish & English literature, and it felt quite both thrilling & gratifying, in a way, that I should come across my own professor from my desert home in such a world-renowned library thousands of miles across the globe.

I have fun with my new friends, and it's a joy to be surrounded fellow English majors / literature lovers. I didn't have an enormous bond with my classmates, I found most of my friends at college outside of classes, so it feels so right & good to have that at last. But just because we're getting our Master's in English doesn't mean we can't use "poo" and "pube" in our Scrabble game. Then again, we were talking poetry & playing Scrabble on a sunny Sunday afternoon.