End of "Pitfall"

Background information:
Evan is a young Doctor of English at the Oregon State University. Jeremy is a student in Evan's senior seminar. At this point of the story, they've already fallen in love- Jeremy writes with a style and grace that Evan has never seen before, and Jeremy has always considered Evan to be one of the most handsome professors at the college.

---

"You aren't... no. Just get in the car." My voice filled with an uncertainty I still didn't have an emotional connection with yet.
Jeremy sighed. The expression I was dreading crept across his features, dark and decided. "I'm not going," he said quietly.
"Because we fought?" I asked with a touch more desperation than I had anticipated.
"No, not because we fought. You know why." He shot a glance over his shoulder and shrugged. "This isn't fair, Evan. You play the martyr every time and where does that leave me? The bad guy."
"I'm not being a martyr. I'm being practical." I tried to reason with myself while I was reasoning with him. "If we stayed tonight, people would talk. What would it look like if a professor got drunk with a student?"
His eyes remained cold and unconvinced.
"We're not having this conversation again, Evan. I'm done talking about it."
A full minute passed before either of us spoke. The rain still pounded on us despite the overhang from my garage roof. All I could think of was the day before when we had been fine. Nothing bothered us and we were happily drifting through life, huddled around our secret. Now the secret threatened to overcome me.
"I can't do this," Jeremy said without looking at me. "I'll see you in class, Dr. Harner."
I didn't go out that night. Or any night after that for a week. My little one bedroom house became an unlocked cage that I was afraid to leave and a sanctuary that I was afraid someone else would defile.
Then the memories came. My house was suddenly an asylum that I was trapped in. Or was it my mind that held me captive and the house was, as it always had been, just a house? The flowers that Jeremy bought me were still tucked neatly in the green vase on top of my kitchen table. They're still just flowers, too, but to me, they represented so much more.

Topics of reflection

It's rare that I find myself reflecting about anything. I used to churn out blog after blog of pointless reflection, whittling away at my understanding of the world and humanity until it all became too pointed and narrow. I would look at something and immediately see a pattern based on my long meditations about how people behave. I don't do that too much now. 

I was great at Sociology. Because I seemed to innately know how people reacted to certain stimuli, better than most, the sociological reasons for reaction in society seemed completely common sensical to me. It wasn't ever really new information- it just sort of flowed together a little better than my blog posts because a trained professor labored over the lectures. 

My current lack of self-reflection must come from the amount of acute stress I'm under. If it isn't a friend that's in need, it's the Racquette. If it isn't the Racquette, it's someone's fading health (usually my own) or a death in the family. When those things aren't struggling against my generally carefree demeanor, it's my own instinctual desire to duck and take cover from the various fears that are hovering just outside my "normal" thoughts, waiting to gain a foothold: failure, prejudice, lovelessness. I recognize the fact that these fears are prevalent in everyone's lives, not just my own, and that it's relatively simple to acknowledge them and push them away. Recognition of these facts isn't enough to make them go away permanently, though. A very smart woman once told me, "You will never be able to get rid of grief completely. It will only change as you grow." I'm still growing, the fears are still changing, but they aren't gone.

...

The date is still shocking to me. I'm entering the final weeks of my last semester as a Junior in college; I'm 21 years old; I'm almost completely financially independent from my parents and already don't have a room at my parents' home anymore (it's being transformed into a room for my Great Aunt). All of this means that I am an adult. Time is pressing against me with an intense urgency, reminding me that it is running and I have to keep up with it. Am I still keeping pace?

A quick self-assessment says that I am, barely. I wanted to publish a book by the time I was 21. Failure #1, but I have a small alternative- it isn't a book, but I'm the editor-in-chief of a weekly publication. In some ways, that makes my personal goal accomplished and then some (it's still not a novel, though). 

I wanted to find someone to keep stride with me in life; I wanted a confidant. There's still plenty of time for that romantic Shakespearean love to evolve, and I'm currently seeing someone who's doing well in my world. It's neither a success nor a failure, but it's a step in the right direction. He makes me happy which definitely weights things more on the success side of the scale (quite a bit more).

I'm excelling in my academic field. I'm in constant communication with my writing professors, and while I may not have straight A's, I know that I am learning something from all of them. Grades, to me, are not everything and never really have been. If I am achieving some kind of personal gain from the work that I do, then I know that I have succeeded already. Perfect grades and absolutely zero cognitive gain is, in my opinion, an enormous failure. Idling through college in the library is another failure, and as I've already noted, that is not something I have to worry about. Success.

...

Maybe it's not that I simply stopped reflecting. Maybe I'm constantly looking at the proverbial mirror before I act. Maybe by keeping my life organized in front of me like the pieces of a chess board, I'm keeping myself in check with efficient decisions. The necessity for reflection is no longer there. Either way, it's all relative. 

A parting thought- I wake up preferring to be alone but surround myself with the people I care about anyway so they know I'm always here. If I can offer people that simple comfort, I am contented knowing that at least my friends have a person they can count on. Even when they can't offer me the same comfort. 

History or example?

What happens when we're forced to face the same bleak outcome we've already faced? 

Cancer in remission does not always stay in remission. Volcanoes are still bubbling just beneath the surface. Are we doomed to suspect, for the rest of our lives, that what plagues us now can still hurt us in the future? 

My views on hope and faith are changing this year. I'm still clinging to the romanticized version of "hope" I read about in my LIT classes, but the edges of that vision are becoming hazy. Do we hope that things will change or do we make them change? We (the royal we that encompasses teams of scientists) cannot cure cancer, but we're still trying. Hawaii is riddled with hot spots of volcanic activity, but still they linger around the mouths of danger in one of its truest forms. 

Is it hope that keeps the numbers crunching in cancer research? Is it faith in the small advances we notice about our relationships that keep us holding on? 

All I know is that we don't have a cure for cancer yet and volcanoes are still shooting ash into the air. I believe in hope still, but for some things, I'll feel better when I see a cure. 

If we're basing our generalizations about life on historical influence or current examples, historically, millions of people have died from cancer in comparison to the few hundred thousand that have survived. Does that small percentage of survivors count as a glimmer of hope? When an earthquake devastates California, it just rebuilds itself- does that count as an example of rebuilding, and thus some desperate hope that it won't happen again for at least a decade? 

Comparing a relationship to cancer is perhaps a little extreme, but sometimes it feels similar to walking around a fieldhouse track for 12 hours; something that Relay for Life suggests as a good representation of a cancer victim's daily struggles. I suppose the hope in this example is that somehow, whether we survive or not, the walking must end. The victim of cancer will live or die.