I was actually,

sad – to leave.

Not that I was surprised to be sad, because I had already felt this way last weekend, but there was a sudden nostalgia to pack up for the last time and think that if I just blinked, a year would wink by.

That on the last day I got to hear some very honest words, some of which I am sure he didn’t mean for me to hear. That I was confronted by some truths that I didn’t want to hear.

That I convinced myself otherwise of in order to motivate myself.

But those words hurt me. More than sitting at a little glass table off by the side, watching rapt with attention at the footage on the screen, more than being chided for being too much like a student who wonders how the law says something implicitly-explicitly.

The latter things are things I can use to improve, so the cost to my emotions is really not bad.

But those other words, so clear and so honest, are definitely to be faulted. Which are unkind and so very saddening, and her life lesson for me in the closing of my last morning.

I will hold your words so close and continue to be afraid of the things that I researched.

–
And I was sad to leave, though I had managed to complete the work that was set for me. Perhaps not perfectly, but as I was working on it the words “We are ourselves the greatest source of our own stress – and this is a good thing, but then four paragraphs takes an hour” resounded.

And as I reviewed the cases, turning over the words of the prompt given to me in email, wondering if any of this could be of use at all – how they would be useful in the alternative, the alternative to my own understanding.

Which was definitely a funny basis to be doing more work on – why would I second guess myself from the start? To question it inside the research and not to ask over lunch.

Or to think that we were taken out to lunch and that was the time they would otherwise use to relax but instead they asked me about my research.

Or maybe I should take it as the doubling up of time and not feel apologetic about it.

I am mindful that there is no free lunch in the world, but that doesn’t change that I was fed and I don’t really think I got to earn my keep.

These thoughts of ‘wanting to be useful’ ‘wanting to be appreciated’ ‘wanting to be worthy’ are all the same coin.

Coin. To be painfully aware that I just want to earn good wages and put them through school and that I’m not in a position to be picky just yet – to also know that there is nothing aberrant or wrong about whatever it is that we have been doing for three weeks.

That it is definitely an option, though there’s a whole other industry that we have to see.

That it may not be the perfect job, or that the other view is that you make your job into the perfect one.

Someday I want to retire and just do mediations. That’s my ideal retirement, right now.

The starting perspective was wrong.

–

Then this misplaced


sadness


that has blossomed in my chest,

is a creeping tendril burying itself in my thoracic cavity.

The flowering vine creeping up my windpipe, making it hard to swallow

the tea that was much too hot,

shrivelling up the little buds,

dislodging petals and

pooling with blood.


Unasked, of course.

I wouldn’t have asked for pain, or for sadness.

But what is this sadness rooted in?

I thought it might have been my pride,

but maybe the correct answer was longing.

But longing, sadness and pain,

all share the same interface.

Then the finding was regret.

–

That I didn’t get to see a mediation session in these three weeks, that I didn’t get to see the end of the other matter or the start of this one.

That I wouldn’t know if the results were any good.

Such was the ending of my first internship, not with a bang, but a whisper.

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