Maryland, My Maryland

"I am sorry to hear that you are to pass your summer in Madrid. What a pity that the diplomatic circle should be doomed to the sterile monotony of that city in the desert; what a residence in Seville might have made for.."

-Correspondence: To Madamoiselle Bouvillier from Washington Irving

Seville, May 28, 1828

It has been decreed that I should spend six months in Maryland, rather than returning to the bricks and the prairies of Galesburg for school come September. It is next to impossible to determine the justice of the situation, because from where I stand things look impossibly bleak and quite unfair, and from the position of the powers that be*, sending me to Illinois once more appears absurd and foolish and irrefutably doomed to fail. It is so terribly difficult to be objective, and "There is everywhere enough liberty of arguing both for and against, on both sides" (from The Iliad By Homer). With that being the case, and with the decision having been quite firmly made, I will have to just take the advice that I love to give, and be a sport.

As it happens, I'm an awfully good sport. I've referenced the miserable Maryland summer several times, but I do not dwell upon it. And, trimester after trimester, I hang back in Baltimore while my friends head back to school to be reunited and transition into a fresh term's joys and dilemmas all at once. No matter how many times this happens, it seems just as calamitous as the last, and I find myself stranded in some little room at Johns Hopkins (outpatient if I'm lucky) waiting on some sinister mystery lurking behind blood vessels to be solved. This is very frustrating, but even with wires protruding from my scalp, connected to the wall, systematically sleep-deprived and video monitored 'round the clock, I have occupied myself. I have looked forward. I have watched movies. Written letters. And so when I've pined, it was in a small room full of diversions that I had created for myself; I was equipped to very quickly open a book and carry on.

The six-month sentence, however, presents new challenges in recreation and  in sportsmanship. I will have to leave the Little Room. I think I will be lonelier than I am now come September.

*The decision to "take a term off" was made by my parents, rather than say, my school's administration.

Photographs taken from the window of the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit at Johns Hopikins Hospital in Baltimore, MD