liminality.

Dear Peggy,

I fear that the words I will write will not suffice, and yet I am left only with these words, and fear that if I do not acknowledge the profound effect you have had on my experience at Stanford in this exact moment in space, and time, that this sensate experience will be ingested and defecated into the annals of my history, wound tightly in the nostalgic reminiscence that occurs when one reflects upon college, because how else are the halcyon days supposed to be archived?

I will forget about the masochism of heartbreak, and the banal existence that consumed my academic body rendering me apathetic and seemingly disenchanted with the institution of learning. My plastic neurons reorganize themselves, but my body remembers even when my mind chooses not to. Particularly when my mind chooses not to.

This past quarter, I occupied The liminal space, more so out of necessity than out of desire. In chasing after time, and fearing the apocalyptic ending of what was supposed to be the best years of my life, where everything fell into space-- into love, into careers, into place--I brought upon another type of cataclysm that left me suspended, literally, if not from ropes tied to the porcelain god à la Sarah Kane, than perhaps industrial sized meat hooks. In my search for life, I, at times toured the border terror-tories of death. As a performer seeking reality on stage, I found myself staging my life as a drama. In my epic quest for love, I fell quickly from my lover's grasp, and unlike Eurydice, I confidently strode toward normalcy only to find that there was no one in my shadow. I became the spectator as my body performed sickness--psychosis, hysteria, depression. It was in this nowhere space, the green flash before the sunset that signified the sunrise in this betweenness.

It was here, that I was given back the gift of time. A fortuitous find in the life of a Stanford student. It is here, that I began to see that I was living life as if it was a scripted voyage toward death. Towards endings. Toward my ultimate fear of being a lone.

It was I, the I that declared that many times in my life I felt more alive when I was on stage, performing, than when I was in the world, performing. Because in some ways I realized that my audience when I was on stage was, first and foremost, my kinesthetic proprioceptive body. The one that knew when I nailed that line, or pelvic contraction. Unlike in "life," my genuine drama, where so often my audience was the other, the anyone-but-me that turned a blind eye to facetious deliveries and faked orgasms.

Peggy, I feel, and I use this verb intentionally, that is to say, empathetically, I feel that you are deeply disenchanted with the insistence of humanity to destruct, and yet equally plagued by its persistence to create. Where do the protectors in our real life dramas (yes! the universal our) exist when death counts account for more than con-science?

The empathy we feel toward another, the inexplicable that exists between the inextricable.

So often love is accompanied by surrender, and in that surrender, the death of sight.

How one moves quicker from status as lover to stranger than lover to friend.

How beauty renders itself closer to tragedy than comedy.

How a kiss of carbon dioxide is both a betrayal of the heart--and yet, an impetus for the self to inhale again. In a cyclic fashion where love renders us both closer to death and closer to life simultaneously.

It is here that you, and I, have both given me, back and anew, time.

And in this uncertainty, the commitment only to commit.

But, perhaps it is the "doubt that makes love love."