I'm still bad at titles.

I wonder when I stopped writing.

I found a slew of notebooks and loose leaf papers, all covered with my adolescent script, all stories and ideas and character sketches. Some are ridiculously lame. Some are quite cute. Some I could re-work now, if I am still a writer.

I emulated the young adult books I read, from happy teenage friends echoing Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield of Sweet Valley to poor, dumb co-eds being chased by malevolent nobodies, a la R.L. Stine. I wrote out entire stories based on my own fantasies about my various crushes: in one story, CJ (someone I'd actually forgotten I had a crush on) and I get stranded with some of our friends in some magical land of stone and water. In another, I actually go out with CJ for a year. In yet another, my best friend dares me to walk up to my epic middle-school crush, Shawn, and kiss him. Sometimes I would rewrite the stories and give all the characters different names. To protect the innocent.

Maybe I stopped writing when I came to Lancaster and died for a little while. I have some incredibly bleak and unfortunately trite poetry from winter of my freshman year, and after that I have serious journal entries. I stopped fictionalizing my own life and stuck to the basics in a blue binder.

I kind of wish I'd channeled all my high school unhappiness into stories. Continued writing out my fantasies in dialogue and description.

I wonder why I am not that kind of a writer anymore. I wonder why it's not the way I pass my free time. I wonder why I can think and dream and observe and not get it down on paper the way I see it.

I wonder how much of who we are when we are children remains once we are not.

"Time passes. Listen. Time passes."

So another month has passed, and I still have no idea where the time goes. I thought the free time would positively pour over me once I was done with the show, but it doesn't really feel that way. Maybe my subconscious is still stuck in the inertia of doing a show and I haven't quite gotten used to my freedom yet. I had a dream the other night that I had another performance and I was so pissed off that our director just wasn't letting us go. But. Not so. It's over, I've been able to connect with my friends more, and I saw a bunch of college friends this weekend at Jonathan and Gina's wedding.

I'm tempted to get really sappy here and ramble on about how much I love my friends. Even the people I don't talk to very often I'm still completely comfortable with. I guess it comes from having shared a dorm with these people, having shared meal after meal with these people, having sat in my pajamas in various dorm rooms and listened to music or watched something goofy or grudgingly made an attempt at playing Smash Bros. with these people.

I slept over at Lindsay's after the wedding, and sharing a room with her is still as natural as... I don't know, organic granola or something. It's soothing slipping back into the roles we played years ago.

It's strange, this growing up thing. Friends of mine are getting married, are married, some are having babies. Other friends already have their MAs, others are getting PhDs. God, remember when we were all just applying for college, before we even knew we could meet so many people worth holding on to for as long as possible? When our high school rooms were still decorated with ribbons from 1994 and the troll dolls we collected when we were nine? Well, that's what I had anyway.

I have no point to this. "It all seems like yesterday and at the same time so far away." It sounds so contrived, but whatever. It's true.

It's just so damn bittersweet.