Semana Santa and Spiraling

Recieved a beautiful email from my dear Ava who is back in Granada. I miss her so much. Every so often I think about what I was doing this exact moment one year ago. It's strange how well I can remember it all, down to the very day. Memories like that help me persist through the bleak winter of upstate new york, which seems to stretch on and on for months past its expiration date. Where was I a year ago today? Well I believe I had just broken my tendon in my foot, so I was in bed, with my foot elevated. I remember hearing all the incredible music of the processions, and how the little boy I lived with would run into my room, grab my hand, pull me out of bed and drag me to the window to watch the spectacle. The air was hot and thick with incense perfumed smoke, and the horns and drums resonated with a noise that grabbed me inside and produced simultaneous fear and respect.How powerful the church once was! How terrible and awe-some was its power that it could reach into every aspect of diverse culture of so many countries and impose itself as fact! How many people died for it, and how many people died because of it! The atonal melodies, the cacophony, the gut-wrenching cries of the saetas,haunted me until late at night, filling me with both comfort and disgust. It was a perfect study on how music can elicit such emotions in one single phrase. Did I mention everyone was drunk? That too, because the death of the son of god is a perfect reason to drink a bottle of wine by yourself. Here I am, locked away in a science laboratory, working on my thesis, dreaming of far away lands and times already past. It's like Israel said to me upon our first meeting too long ago to mention: "Time isn't cyclical. It it isn't linear. It moves like a spiral, and at certain points, it all seems to line up perfectly. And everything will make sense, because you will realize that everything in your life has happened exactly the way it should."
So long I've been wishing this haunting feeling to leave me. So long I've wanted to be content where I am. But perhaps this discontentment is simply what I need to be feeling. This constant plaguing loneliness, the shyness which only seems to take over when I'm on this frozen campus, the way I feel misunderstood or misread, as if I have to make excuses for myself simply for being who I am- these things must pass. I want it to be sunny. I want it to stop snowing. I want to see Ava again, and hear her play the guitar on some street corner or in some plaza, giggling and smiling with all our companions, just being so glad to be alive. I want to tell her to wait for me, I want to tell the whole city to wait for me- that I'll come back some day if they'd only wait. But the beauty of the city, just like the beauty of life, is that once you have something incredible and recognize just how extraordinary it is, it changes completely.
And it's almost time for graduation, and I keep thinking about how they used to tell us "Don't change, you're perfect the way you are" or "Don't let the world change you" or whatever ridiculous advice they gave us at our highschool graduation. Don't let the world change me?! Of course I'm going to let the world change me. Without change there's only death. and even in death the memory of ourselves changes. Sometimes I love this life so much that I want to hold onto each moment, terrified I am going to forget something or someone or some feeling. I get anxious at the thought of moving on, leaving the past behind me. But then there are moments when I realize that the past never dies, that it follows you and haunts you in moments of solitude. It spirals and parallels your every movement. It emerges when you most need it, like 9am on Good Friday in upstate New York.