Snoqualmie

Sometimes I think I'm bipolar. Other times I think I'm fine.

Yesterday it hit me: summer is over.

My actual summer finished months ago. I no longer spend my days fingering 500-year-old bones and watching the skies for the afternoon thunderstorm. In the time it's been since I talked to any of my summer classmates, the Berkeley beauracracy has requested three kinds of supporting documents and given me credit for the class so I can graduate. I've heard it said that only when you're forgotten are you dead, and east of the Mississippi I'm definitely starting to stiffen.

That hasn't stopped it feeling like summer, though. As long as the sun is reasonably shining it's always high noon and midsummer at Kingman. There are bikes and parks and frolics and lavish expressions of love. But I came home last night, late for dinner after working on a class project, and found home dark and cold and lonely. Dinner was gone, my late plate was sitting unfilled and unnoticed by the side of the food line, and nobody I wanted to see was around. I don't know who I was hoping for, but they weren't there. Outside was cold and damp, my room smelled like my roommate's pot stash, and I orbited for a while around the house's common rooms before ending up huddled on a futon under the roof deck with a cup of tea and an archaeology book. I woke up long enough to sulk at people who'd done little to deserve it and brush off everyone who offered me human contact, and then collapsed into bed.

It's the usual annual cocktail: it's cold, it's gloomy, it's dark when I come home from class, and it's going to be that way for months. I'm behind in my classes and buried under papers I haven't started. My double honeymoons of being back in school and back in the co-ops could only last so long, and these things have become routine just in time for routine to become exhausting.

A few weeks ago I posted a chart on my door listing stimulants I'm allowed to have and how much of them I can use. There are daily not-to-exceeds for tea and coffee, allowable circumstances for chocolate and sugar binges, and a dosage guide for love. My housemates look askance at it; I'm known to be one of very few stubbornly sober people in the house and seeing "Dianna" and "stimulant" together seems to throw them. But I know it's not for them to judge. I can only hope that when they inevitably find me sprawled on the floor and twitching, overdosed on the Magnetic Fields, they'll pick me up gently and tell the doctors that I'm not really a bad person. I just never learned how to say no to ukeleles.