Click to enlarge, or something.

“Still waiting.”

Alex leaned on the railing, hunched over, chin up. Gazing out at the ocean.

“How long, now? Two years? Three?” Russ shook his wrist, swirling the dregs of a can of Mountain Dew.

“And many more to pass.”

Seagulls screeched excitedly as they fought over morsels on the midday beach. A strong wind rustled through the palm stands, one particularly supple tree occasionally throwing a shadow over the two friends.

“How long are you going to play this game?” asked Russ. “Listen, lunch break’s almost—”

“Maybe I’ll quit.”

“Good one.”

“I’m serious.” Alex stood straight, stretched, and cracked his neck.

“Yeah, and then what’ll you do? Go soul-searching?” Russ snickered, then chucked his drink at the nearest blue bin. The can bounced off the pavement.

Alex walked over to the discarded can, picked it up, and deposited it in the recycling bin. He turned back to Russ and shrugged.

“What do you call someone who waits? A waiter?”

“I call him a dumbass.” Russ put his hands in his pockets and began walking back toward the office. “C’mon, daydream hour is over.”

Connections seem to be springing up everywhere. A few strands here and there, then ropes marking off a site. More and more, and soon there are fibrous walls enclosing us. I said once before that we make our connections in the past—unless we’re Takemoto and we narrate our future in the past.

I’m starting to make them in the present.

The kind we’re expected to make, the kind that doesn’t make us eligible for tragedy.

Let me be clear: when I last spoke of connections, I was referring to thematic connections that help us understand our lives. Not those lesser demons that spawn constantly from such things as education. That’s the kind I’ve been making, so I’m fine. Probably.

They’re making themselves, though.

I’m starting to recognizes huge swathes of my college peers, within my major—people I never thought I’d see again. I share classes with them. They talk to me. They remember me. I’m not anonymous. How strange.

I feel like I’m being closed in. As I blindly continue to spin my wheels in the ruts of yesterday, today’s experiences are glomming together and forming thick mud with which to flood the path.

Almost every conversation returns to the subject of another. In discussing autobiography, inevitably Facebook is mentioned, and with it, privacy and disclosure, and with that, I recall a buzz made the other day on the topic. What does a rhetoric class on narrative and imagery have to do with privacy policy and job recruitment? So much, apparently, so much that I cannot choose to ignore the connection.

Lectures past spring to mind; conversations past repeat themselves; arguments past continue to vie for validity.

Time moves more and more rapidly.

I guess chunking is real—and there we go, another connection. I can’t divorce Socrates from Philonous and Hylas, nor lies from lying from deception from confession from autobiography from creative nonfiction from writers write from tautology from Socrates is mortal—and all the way back around—, nor truth from Nietzsche from metaphor from Whorf from language from time from turning from Henry James from Dickinson from my own writing from Kant from Spinoza from infinite trollish internet jokes and—

and what?

Connections spiral out of control… “oh no / what’s this / a spider web”

We run in circles. We skirt issues, we circumnavigate the elephant in the room. We return to the same point again and again as what looks like a door in the distance turns out to be taped off with the yellow caution tape that is yet another connection. If we had scissors, could we break out?

…

In a dream last night, I knew I was dreaming. She was there—she and so many others—and I knew she wouldn’t want me to know she was. So I kept my head down when I felt her approach, I averted my eyes. Maybe she wouldn’t even notice me. A gaggle of people walked closer, passing by. We were in a meadow, but I had a bucket and a mop. I was cleaning up. How strange.

Several folks passed by, none paying any attention to me.

And then I could take it no longer—there she was, I knew, mere feet away, so close and yet so far, and maybe she would speak—and I raised my head and opened my eyes, and she was speaking, and our eyes met for a brief moment and she knew what I was doing mentally as I let myself see her:

I don’t remember what it was that I was doing. I just remember that she knew.

Her eyes reflected so much understanding that I don’t remember their color.