Sand Mandalas

I’m curled into my new lady-friend on the couch. After two months of the exhaustive weekend shuffle between sleeplessness at her apartment and mine--a shuffle from which I still occasionally wake up unsure of where I am, disoriented and reaching for phantom light switches from the other apartment--amid this chaos girlfriend still seems premature. We exist in that space between intimacy and strangeness. I know the pitch of her voice when she’s trying hide her rising anxiety, but I only learned two weeks ago her legal first name. It still feels weird on my tongue. 

Yet, I shiver when I see her toothbrush besides the sink during the week, the presence of her when she’s gone, the promise of an immediate future. She intends to spend time with me. Intended is then perhaps a better fit than girlfriend. She is my intended, the anticipated addition to my life. At school my friends call her my “u-haul girlfriend”. I recently taught them what “u-hauling” meant culturally. And to them we seem to be moving light years faster than 20 year-olds do, because we are not 20 anymore. I want to apologize to them for the things I said while limerent.  I spent this first month lost, high, and with a vague feeling of academic uselessness to life on the Hilltop-- counting down the minutes until Friday when I can feel the hard edges of myself dissolve into her; to fall into a language-less space.

She is teaching me to embrace the sand mandala of Snapchat; to create stories that dissolve moments later so we can share our days together.  I don’t understand it; it’s the writer in me, I want to bear witness to each new thing. Each part of her that unwraps before me like a day in an advent calendar; a surprise either sweet or bitter. But, with impending graduate school acceptance letters looming, perhaps she is teaching me about the sand mandala of love instead-- a thing that can be barely be touched by fingertips  before it brushes away. She has, from the moment we met, been confident forging ahead. She plans things weeks in advance when I have not yet accepted there will be weeks in the future. I admire M’s ability to act confidently in the moment. I feel as if I move with the weight of all herstory: as if choosing for myself chooses for the entire sisterhood. I’m filled with an inherited existential anxiety.

I called her Midwestern at the dinner table and she thought I was making fun of her. She’s smart: she is my favorite mix of academic feminist rude and Midwestern polite.  I adore it about her. She is so different from the women I know in my communities. I’m learning to watch sportsball games for her. I don’t understand how the volume level of of an audience translates to the performance of a sports team. I do love stadium-size beer and I’ve come to appreciate the relationship to alcohol consumption and enjoyment of sports.  She had the privilege of attending my feminist play featuring a body-movement story of my first period and a monologue about our first date--it’s recitation inconveniently timed to our third date. I can’t tell who is being the better sport, hockey games have beer and avant garde theatre does not.

But at the end of the weekend I return to my cloistered Hilltop. My days regimented by work and bells and ordinary time. This place is also a sand mandala, a place at once familiar and sterile. I’m surprised how homey this place of transition can feel, buildings that bear no lasting imprint of the people who passed through these halls, save perhaps for a name on the wall, a place I am afraid to breathe because it might blow away.