clothespin

Fall keeps rolling out like multiple orgasms. Each week I wonder when winter will arrive, and there is a new batch of burning bushes: yellow, orange, red on my way to school.

On the drive home from school I was on the trees' side of the street and could see them more closely. Below the yellow one was a flaming ring of leaves, as if someone had spread them out perfectly underneath, a yellow shadow at high noon.

It was indecent; I was appalled. I felt like I do when I take a shirt off and throw it in the laundry--indignant that my body heat is absorbed by a pile of clothes waiting to be washed.

[What can I say? It's been quarter crunch time, finals. All the papers are now in. Of course, 30 of them are in to me.]

When I don't sleep, I feel my body is betraying me. How could my body not want rest, the opportunity to repair? The stress has finally subsided, but my mind still spins like an electronica loop I'm too tired to dance to.

On the last day of class with my students, I wanted to make them stay the whole 2.5 hours. But they started packing their bags after the second exercise, and I didn't have the energy to stop them. Erasing the board in an empty room, I smiled to myself, and felt an ache in my throat, where the sadness collects when it won't come out. I didn't expect this.

I didn't tell them that they were my first class. (Sure, I've given the odd lecture on how to use Dreamweaver, and there was the seminar I taught on web design. But they were the first to complain when I kept them the full class time, the first to blatantly ignore the assignments I gave them. The first to amaze me with their revisions, the first to thrill me with insights I hadn't though of.) There was much I didn't say to them, too scared that the boundary between student and teacher would be blurred. I was hanging onto the quarter with my fingernails; I wouldn't have been able to handle their problems. (A silly thought since they probably had similar ones; we were all adjusting to new academic programs.) But I also cringe at memory, times I pushed boundaries of my professors, sometimes with dire consequences.

The academic school year is the cycle of life sped up too quickly. Birth to death in ten weeks. And it is a death, make no mistake.

Who said that sleep is a form of death? (I can never remember quotes and the people who said them; it will be my downfall as an academic.) Perhaps I'm reluctant to go into the tomb-like blackness above my bed, to let the quarter end.