Last Semester

Sometimes I feel very ready for age, almost excited. Looking into the faces of the newly familiar, watching the ways they have made sense and made peace with their bodies, there is such intense, unique and sad, temporally sad beauty. We are only here so long, we might as well make ourselves comfortable for the time we are here. Some people wear their bodies so gracefully, inhabit them so fully, every part: their hands and fingers, the sadness around their eyes, the way the skin begins to lose its fullness around the cheekbones. The steady line of the shoulders, how the body grows thicker. The gentle confrontation of the physical body with time, how carefully carved, how painstaking. How each moment, every memory is tied to the very space we inhabit.
I used to believe that that was the gift, that time was a gift, that the memory and the body were those places which we could hold that gift divorced of is linear state. That concept fell by the wayside, but forcefully so. I feel as if dwelling in memory, living in that gift is in part a sin, not in the western sense but in the sense of contributing to your own downfall or stunting your own progression. Does living in the past, even from time to time, limit ones ability to choose to live fully in the present?
Will I ever learn to write without that crutch, without fishing the past? Is it even possible to let lie alone, to leave? That action leaves a scar in itself.
It is interesting the thought that there is nothing so remarkable about oneself, nothing which is unpredictable given the past, given conditions. X behaves as such when encountering conditions Y. Each and every one of us is a very beautiful proof of some divine formula, every object.
Last night my mother claimed I was one of the best poets of my age. She also claimed I told her a professor present at my reading last semester told me he had heard about me and my writing before, and had wanted to see me, and that he enjoyed my work. This I now very vaguely remember, but when she told me I believed I had fabricated it. Why do I not write these things down, these specific details, to return to later? I’d like to remember that. How kind.
I have so many questions about my place in things at the end of that semester. Where did I stand? It is so hard to see oneself. I had many drawn in close around me, but outside of that I had little idea of much of anything. That is a semester I wish could be lived again, in all its ugliness and spacious beauty. So much lost, so much so wholly gained. At the end it was so present. Those I think are the memories which call us back the fastest, again and again. Those moments. How new, how whole things seemed, how ready.