the end of love

What comes after
the end of love?
After you have resorted to
the superstitious and the superfluous
after you have compared
the alignments of stars
after you have looked at numbers
over and over,
until compatibilities swim
in front of your eyes

When you begin to wonder
what if, but if, and if
when you let the questions
swallow your thoughts
and
cloud your mind with
unnecessary conjectures
with remorse and
incomprehension and when
you think there should be a law

that there should be a law against
pain,
that you should sue for a broken heart,
that one heart should not, would not
turn away
when the other is still hanging on,
when it seems that 'half-hearted'
is a term coined
for the benefit of this place you are in.

What comes after
the end of love?

In less than a year I will no longer be able to list the same mailing address as I do now, a comfortable box number in Blanchard which I have taken for granted. It will soon belong to someone else, and knowing that feels very strange because I can't imagine that number written under anyone else's name but mine. There's a calendar on my wall that's been on November 2012 since November, and I haven't bothered to take it down. Thinking about time, how it's running out, how there is never enough, how there are so many things to squeeze into so little of it- that's bad enough on its own without having a calendar kindly letting me know how fast the days are running out. It started last semester. I didn't say I couldn't wait for the semester to end, my silence an acknowledgment of the limited time I have left here. What happens once the semester ends? There's two left. Then just one. Then it's over, but it feels like yesterday when I stepped off the shuttle that brought me here from Hartford Bradley International Airport. I remember feeling the awe, feeling intimidated, trying to take in my new surroundings. I remember before that, how I used to obsessively look for any pictures of campus, look at them for many minutes at a time trying to imagine what it would be like, anticipating living with my roommate, becoming best friends. We don't talk anymore, except for an uncomfortable nod when we acknowledge each other's presence in situations where the other person can't be avoided- but I always marvel at how things turn out.
Sometimes I wonder if people collect possessions because the things they own make them feel rooted, somehow more permanent. That's definitely true for me, except that no matter how many things I own, my suitcases are right there, reminding me that there is only limited space and I will have to give a lot away. I don't have a plan, because this was as far as my imagination had gotten me (even when I use the word gotten now, I realize how being here has liberated me from the stuffiness of my Convent school education, where it wasn't considered a word. A relic left behind by colonizers in the form of anglophiles.), I had just imagined going to college. I couldn't even think of anything beyond that. And now that beyond is fast approaching.