when i woke up this morning a kind of exhaustion i've never quite felt has taken hold of me. i didn't feel it at all while von was here, because everything seemed so relaxing and easy this weekend, it was almost a kind of recuperation for every kind of tiredness and stress in this past semester. and yet by monday afternoon i was lying in bed - wide awake, but unable to think or move, a sense of - depletion. von coming was a kind of anaesthesia, but now it all returns.

i feel some loneliness, though it isn't for want of people. i was at the echols dinner last night, in the dome room of the rotunda, and i felt that i didn't want to graduate and that i didn't want to be away and i didn't want to leave charlottesville. i wish there was something i could do - like become fabulously rich and famous so i can give massive amounts of money to the echols program and the college and the english department. and - i missed charles vandersee. dean sofka, at our table, talking about how echols scholars are selected, said that when charles v was in charge he used to go to admissions and read every single essay and included personal notes to all the students. and hearing this i loved him for it, as i loved him for so many things that he did. i think now, sometimes, that on top of shock and missing him i also feel some guilt over him, that i hadn't appreciated him as much, that i had read many things about him differently as a first year from the way i did later on, especially in my third and fourth year.

i saw people i hadn't seen for a while, and i met some new people, and everybody had something to say - that they were going to law school, med school, that they've been accepted to cornell, penn, berkeley, that they have jobs with government agencies, non-profit organisations... and feeling as though to say that i was going home for a year, with no definite plans, doesn't convey the way i feel about going on to graduate work. it's only fifteen months to get a breather, to be in singapore and to find my other foot, i hardly feel that there is no continuity, as if i were going somewhere this august when i'm not. sometimes i wonder if it was the right decision to leave off for a year, just because i believe so much that the shock when i go home and the restlessness i may feel when august comes may be too great, especially when all my friends at home will be working too. but i do need that year, to read and to think, to travel and to write. only i'm afraid of - distance - of being apart from people i have come to love here.