I was just going through a journal of mine from when I was 19 years old and read a paragraph that really exemplified the whole "I never existed again" thing, 4 years before I would hear the Djavan song that would give meaning to the feeling I had. And this was only the beginning of me feeling this way. I had not known MQ for a year yet, and I was already falling into the obsession circuit in my brain.
Anything in brackets are edits I've made in retrospect. This was written in January, 2004. Emphasis, with the bold, was also added by me later.
I think it was last Thursday, so Thursday, January 6. It was the first time I had my Spanish class with Sra. Highfill (and wow, I just suddenly had déjà vu with her and her class…like I’d been there before or something). Anyway, a girl came in named Sarwat. I had seen her on thefacebook before, back when I was looking up stuff on Azmat…who didn’t end up pairing up with [MQ] at all. It was just me being silly…again.
Anyway, Sarwat came in, and for whatever reason, I just thought of [MQ] whenever I looked at her. Okay, it was obvious why I did…I was thinking about the whole culture thing, and if, for him to ever really consider me, that’s what I would have to be…Desi, Pakistani, whatever…and I never would be…well, obviously. But yes, I thought about that, and then I started thinking back to him, and all the silly little conversations we had… And that progressed, until I thought about him all day. And then that kid who’s in my Biochemistry discussion and apparently living in South Quad, Ajay…he reminded me of him, too. And I would see back of heads [around me in class], and I would get startled when [those backs of heads] looked slightly like [his], and almost wanted to close my eyes and run away in case the head turned around and it was him…
It was something like that, not so eloquently. And I realized at the end of the day that the whole thing was ridiculous. I hadn’t seen him since November, and now it’s January, and I hadn’t really spoken to him since we did in the summer, and that was kind of shitty in itself, and I was still nervous to come anywhere close to him, even if it was second hand through his friend Sarwat, who never mentioned him...
[...] as she looked at me as I pronounced my name [for the professor in class], I’d wondered if perhaps she’d heard that name before…and for what reason she would have heard it. [Maybe she'd heard about this girl from him, this girl that was obsessed with him]. Or if it was from the back of random people’s heads that kind of looked like his…I just realized it was getting out of hand, and that I’d spent more time that day thinking of him than thinking of anything that had to do with me.
And I started to wonder how much of myself I had lost in the process of being in love with him. Yes, I may not have ever gotten him, but I was in love with him, and I wanted him, and I thought that if we worked together, I could marry him…all of that foolishness. But I wondered how much of myself I lost. I thought I was losing my personality by being so stuck on him… But maybe that wasn’t the case at all. Maybe, in the beginning of this whole ordeal, I didn’t have that much personality to begin with. Not as much as I thought I had.
This was remarkable for me to read. In that last paragraph especially, it's like I couldn't even remember who I had been before there was him. I go on to write about how my first journal entry began with me musing about the my teenaged crush, Corey, and I wondered how many legitimate thoughts had I had that were not about some male.
Another (perhaps) remarkable thing is that my writing hasn't changed so very much in the last 11 years. I'd like to think I'm a slightly better writer now, and definitely the content is more mature now, but oh well.
I'm, in general, stunned by how naïve I was...11 years is a lot. I ended this entry thinking about taking out loans to take an MCAT class. That's how long ago that was. That was a more than 4 years of medical school, 1 year of public health school and 3 years of residency ago. Wow!
And it's also incredible how you can lose yourself in someone who in the end has nothing to do with you...
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