Being Still

I found myself just sitting in the corner of the library cafe today. Just sitting. Listening to music. Hands empty and still in my lap. Remnants of a pear and empty stamp book to my right, my criss-crossed planner to my left, phone on silent and buried somewhere underneath my jacket and laptop back.

I was startled that I was still. Quiet. There was no pressure to do anything–I was caught up on my work for tomorrow and Thursday.  My letter to a friend was written and just had to be mailed. No students were in for office hours. I didn’t my next meeting for another half hour. Quiet. I savored the moment. They’re few and far between.

The thing I like about studying in quiet places is that even though you’re surrounded by people, everyone pretty much minds their own business. And I can sit in the corner and people watch–see what small things people are absorbed in. One Google page, a science program, three bagels, a communications article, three cups of coffee (one Mason jar of tea), two Facebook pages. Tumblr. Two people (including me) with headphones in. Seven laptops.

This morning was rough. I rolled out of bed and got slapped in the face by registration. That is: I tried to problem solve and created a problem. Our WiFi at home frequently craps out for no reason–after my morning shower and before breakfast, I usually restart our WiFi, because I’ve been unable to check my email in bed (again). Because registration for classes is always a struggle, I decided to beat the WiFi at its own game and just restart it at 6:45 a.m. before it had a chance to crap out. I and two of my housemates were set to register at 7:00 a.m., and by 6:50 a.m., the WiFi hadn’t rebooted. 6:54 a.m. found us throwing on sweatpants and sweaters and flying out to the car to get to campus (and the campus WiFi) before 7:00 a.m. We zoomed into the College Circle and huddled in our housemate’s car, fingers furiously clicking on buttons. At about 7:12 a.m., we returned home–I registered for 3 classes, only 1 of which I actually needed. For some reason, KnightWeb (our registration system) wasn’t registering that my prerequisites for English/German were actually complete–which meant an early morning trip to the Registrar. When your morning starts out like that, little bumps feel big. My hair was impossible to curl this morning. I made the coffee too strong. I forgot my water bottle at home. I banged my knee on my bed. I couldn’t find the flats I wanted to wear today. I felt ridiculously unprepared for my presentation in class. In short, I arrived at a professor’s office hours hyper-alert and grumpy.

And then the day started getting better. We had a great discussion about my future plans (which are solidifying a little) and got to catch up a little. I told her to come visit me in NYC this summer if I get an internship, and she said yes, she’d love to. And we should just walk and eat and walk and eat and go to the Met and have a cultural day.

“I mean,” she said, in a sudden burst of enthusiasm, “I mean, I want to come to your wedding!”

Little things like that can completely re-orient my day. And then we talked about Toni Morrison’s Beloved in my Wom Lit class and my day further improved. Between reading Octavia Butler short stories in the class I’m TA’ing for and Beloved and knowing that I’m taking a fiction class next semester, I’ve been hyper-aware of good fiction and the craft used. Both these authors blow me away. I want to finish reading the Butler short story collection and I want to read Jazz by Morrison. I went back to my happy place, with themes and ideas buzzing around in my head.

Listening to Rachel Platten today (1000 Ships, specifically)–I was fascinated by the comment that a lot of writing is influenced by what you’re listening to. Definitely do a lot of songs bring me right back to a certain time: Lana del Rey and Foster the People rockets me back to spring semester freshman year, and Kesha’s Die Young puts me back at winter of sophomore year. Bands like Fleet Foxes and Blue Roses remind me of senior year of high school. Ellie Goulding puts me back on a bus in Germany, commuting to and from work, hour long trips into Hamburg.

It’s been a good semester, I wrote to a friend this morning. And it has. I can’t believe it’s already halfway over. I think I am always shocked by how fast time goes by these days. I never feel prepared for how fast everything seems to slip by.

 

And the crazy lady emerges (again).

One of the reasons I appreciate my best friend at college is that she gives it to me straight. We’re sitting on the slouchy  brown couch in my college house, drinking tea, and I’m puzzling over a sentiment many adults have felt it recently appropriate to tell me. I’m sure it’s meant to be comforting, but it unsettles me instead. In essence, it’s that I’m intimidating (to boys), and so I’m quizzing S. relentlessly about whether or not I am intimidating (and not fully understanding what it means).

“Honey,” she says finally, looking me square in the eye. “Other girls do the demure vixen thing really well, the ‘let me tell you all my problems and take care of me’ thing, the batting of the eyelashes. YOU, on the other hand, are the girl who flies in like a whirlwind, going ‘HOLY SHIT I HAVE SIX POEMS DUE AND TWELVE MEETINGS, OH HI, I LOVE YOU, OKAY BYE’ and flies back out.”

I need about five minutes of helpless shaking on the couch, because I’m laughing too hard to respond. Terribly, terribly accurate. This is me. This is happily, happily me, and I’m in love with it. (Minus some of the white hairs I’ve been finding, which I suspect are some stress hairs.)  This part of me is also a  reason I think NYC and I are a good fit; when it’s not the weekend, I am always headed somewhere, I always have somewhere to be, something to do, and a to-do list that may just rival the bell tower of Sturges Hall. I have goals and plans and dreams that are often overwhelming and frequent panic attacks that I can’t do all of them and that I’m going to fizzle out into some miserable human being hating herself for taking a cubicle job, but having to pay the rent.  I always think of Sylvia Plath’s worry, expressed in her journal:

“What horrifies me the most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”

I’m in my junior year of college, which means that I’ve gotten socked with the sudden decision that, “FUCK YEAH, I’m applying for MFA programs”, followed by the gaping black hole of “I HAVE TO APPLY TO MFA PROGRAMS”, and also “WAIT, GRE’s ARE NOW A THING. BUT. BUT. BUT.”  Also normal coursework–and somehow, I’ve mysteriously ended up taking 20 credits this semester, after having pledged to take only 14. I SWEAR I don’t know how this happens. (It just does, as part of the colorful paint splatter that seems to be most of my life.)

I suppose the first problem, as the popular saying goes, is identifying that you have a problem. Here’s the problem: I’m a control freak living in an overachiever’s body and the combination is not doing great things for my sanity. I’m managing the problem by doing the things that I can: my room is kept clean, I try and eat well, I put together outfits with care (so that I at least look like my life is somewhat in order), I do the small assignments that I can manage on bad days. Luckily, I’m also surrounded by people who keep me sane. My poor parents put up with so much of my shit on a weekly basis (read: hour and a half phone call last night, in which I informed them in the same breath that I was applying to grad school and that I also was terrified of not getting in because holy selectivity and my voice started to do the high-pitched panic thing again). One of my blessed, blessed professors had me storm her office today for fifteen minutes of really fast paced talking and angsting and “SEND HELPS”, after which she agreed to do a directed study with me to actually write a portfolio for grad school, I think I keep her laughing with my antics. I hope I do. It’s encouraging that she can see me in an MFA program.

“I think this is your passion,” she said. “I think this is something I can see you doing and doing something more with your MFA than being an adjunct.” I frowned at the dig to herself (mostly because as much as I don’t want to admit it, my mom is probably right and I’m probably going to teach at some point in my life. The teaching I’m actually getting excited about; it’s mostly the “admitting Mom is right” thing that I don’t want to acquiesce to just yet. Leftover teenage angst, it’s fine. I maintain that I don’t have to be a fully functioning adult until I can drink legally and rent a car. I have two months and five more years respectively.) But my professor’s words are encouraging.

“Okay. Okay. I can do this.”

She thinks my plan (my obsessive, over-thought-out-ducks-in-a-row plan) is excellent. I give her a huge hug on the way out.

“I’m sorry you always get all my crazy.” I bury my face in my scarf, kind of embarrassed, but also laughing at how supremely ridiculous I can be.

She laughs too. “No, you’re fine. I like seeing you, no matter what state you’re in.” (She will never see me in pre-coffee, pre-shower 7 am grump daze, because she will not like me then. No one likes me then. I don’t like me then.)

I’m back in the library now (about to dash  off to an internship meeting), but I feel a lot calmer, after those fifteen minutes. I’ve been see-sawing back and forth a lot, about how exactly I feel about everything/my life/most of my life being out of control. But for now, crazy lady has stopped banging on her cage, so I’m going to take this opportunity to go function in society while she’s quiet.

Grad School? MFA? Year Abroad? Work? Question Mark, Question Mark, Question Mark.

I think almost everyone I know right now is either in a state of panic, elation, or both. As a junior in college, so many wonderful things are happening–and so many downright terrifying things are happening.

My housemate burst into our house today from her late class, shouting, “I’M GOING TO ENGLAND!!!!’, having just been accepted for study abroad in the spring semester. Everyone in my living room shrieked and covered her in a mess of flailing limbs and congratulations.

People’s lives are starting to take shape and form–some of us (the lucky bastards) are realizing what they want to do for the rest of their lives. (Or what they think they want to do for the rest of their lives.) We’re applying for internships and submitting work, and feeling generally optimistic about out future.

On the other hand, I spent a full ten minutes during break in poetry class having a mental blackout of sheer panic, because I realized that Holy shit I need to start working on a portfolio for MFA graduate programs and oh my God, I didn’t factor that in at all and wait, I DO have to take the GRE’s, WEAJFJSD;FJDAF;DAF;, WHATTTTTTTTTT, when am I going to do that, !@#$^&*, which led to What do I even want to do for my MFA? Non-fiction? Poetry? Am I even talented enough for an MFA program? How do I know if I am? Wait, fuck, I haven’t published anything yet, I have like, no publishing credentials. Well fuck me. What if everything I write just sucks and I don’t get accepted anywhere. (The stereotypical writer’s pit of self-doubt and loathing happened.) How do I choose? I’m only a junior in college, cry cry cry, which turned into, Didn’t I want to apply for that government funded year abroad in Germany and write and work, and it all went right back to HOLY CRAPPOLA, LIFE CHOICES, NOTHING IN MY LIFE MAKES SENSE, AND I HAVE NOTHING UNDER CONTROL, and this led to me just putting my head down on my desk and regretting very much that I hadn’t had this panic attack before seeing one of my professors, who always makes me slow down and pretty much reassures me that no, I’m not going to graduate college and become a miserable failure.

This syncs pretty well with my other friends’ sentiments. My best friend ranted about student teaching last week, one friend is awaiting her LSAT scores, another friend is anxious about applying to law school, other friends are turning around the idea of going for an MFA in their heads. And there’s the panic, panic, panic part of it.

My friend, C., and I agreed today that we vacillate between two frames of mind:

1) Everything is out of our control, so we’ll just do the best we can, organize what we can of our lives, assert that little bit of “my work can make it” arrogance you need to get anywhere in writing, and otherwise sit and eat cake as consolation. knowing that we’ll make it with some hard work and time.

2) EVERYTHING IS OUT OF OUR CONTROL, WE’RE NEVER GOING ANYWHERE, WHY DOESN’T ANYTHING MAKE SENSE MY LIFE IS A ROLLERCOASTER OF ABSOLUTE NONSENSE AND CHAOS AND WHY DON’T I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING YET. *cue the stomping around angstily*

I came home at 10:30 pm tonight, did my dinner dishes, crawled onto my bed, and tried not to dip back into poetry-break-panic. Revising my fiction piece that’s due for upper level workshop applications seemed pretty reasonable. Something manageable. I revised mine, a friend’s, and constructively chopped another friend’s poem to pieces. Writing I can do. Revising I can do. These are small, manageable chunks of my life that keep me sane, keep me calm. I tweaked other poems in progress, tried to focus singularly on what was in front of me. It worked. The panic abated.

I’m going out for sushi tomorrow night with a friend after another hellish day, and we’re going to decompress and whine and angst a little, and be gigantic English major nerds in public, and it’s gonna be GREAT. And in the meantime, I’m going to have to keep reminding myself to breathe. And take walks. And be good to myself. And that each day comes as it comes, no faster, no slower. I still have the safety net of three semesters of college ahead of me. As my dad is fond of saying: “it is way too early to panic.”

Here’s a fun snippet of a piece I’m currently working on that sums up how I feel:

               I’m a Pollock
painting, you tell me,
with hair like brushstrokes & undercurrents
in my eyes.

Time to let that one stew a little. Off to bed, off to Thursday. Strugglebus Wednesday, signing off.

Fall Break Reflections

The house is cold. My house is always cold, which is why I’m huddled in an oversized yellow-and-black patterned sweater, yoga pants, and fuzzy socks, and regretting my decision to not blow dry my hair. It’s my last day home–fall break goes by so fast–and I’m spending it in an empty house, while my parents are at work. I like the space to rattle around our too-clean house (just in case an interested buyer wants to come look at our house), write out recipes to take back to college with me, to write my fiction piece, to try and read Ben Franklin (that’s not going so well), to have a quiet breakfast, staring out at our newly raked lawn, with the trees shaking down red and gold tresses. I’m making dinner tonight–trying to get my parents through the week without having to cook much. The casserole I made last night will take them through tomorrow, and hopefully there will be leftovers from dinner tonight. I worry too much. People tell me that all the time.

My room feels like a guest bedroom. They repainted the naked walls, took down my bookcases, got rid of the clock. We spent a good hour yesterday, switching out my chest of drawers. I’d been cramming my adult clothes into my childhood dresser all summer–the one I’ve had since babyhood–and wondering why they didn’t all fit. Other than the fact that I have an obscenely large wardrobe, I’ve also had this chest of drawers for twenty years. My parents bought a dark wood behemoth at the annual Baukville antique sale this summer to replace it. Things that are not fun: trying to maneuver chest of drawers’ up and down my narrow staircase and out my front yard into our barn. Nuh uh.  At any rate, my mom relented and put a mirror up and a vase of flowers up, to alleviate the “guest bedroom” feeling.

The bright red For Sale sign by our mailbox still startles me. My parents waver back and forth on selling and want to know what I think. I tell them it doesn’t matter–our next house, this house, wherever we are next will only be a temporary place of residence for me in any case. It’s their house, really. I sat out on our back deck all of Saturday afternoon, soaking in October sun and doing homework. It’s been three days of lots of work, but also lots of play. I went to church with my parents Sunday and went out to lunch with them afterwards; filled out an application while my mom made cranberry bread in the kitchen. Nice, homey things.

Every time I come home, leaving gets harder. My mom gets out of breath carrying drawers up and down stairs, I don’t like my dad on top of our roof, pulling leaves down anymore–they’re getting older and it makes me nervous to be taking off, leaving them with the chore of selling a house and moving out, all by themselves. But I come home and it all seems so familiar-foreign to me, like a memory I’m re-visiting. I went to my former place of employment Saturday night, all dressed up. It was funny–the country club members either didn’t recognize me out of context or did…I’m not sure which is worse. I spent most of my time with the employees working and floating around with a cocktail in hand, engaging in polite small talk. One of the worst things about getting older is the inevitable question, “So do you have a significant other yet?” I extricated myself from that conversation as soon as I gracefully could. But it was nice seeing everyone, watching the Otesaga Hotel light up across the bridge, the lights reflecting onto the water. Standing at the front porch railing, where I had two proms, where I’ve worked for three summers, it was like a final goodbye to that part of my life. I drove home, turning the radio up, and just drove back roads for a half hour, feeling a little sorry to be leaving again so soon.

I suppose it’s a thing of your twenties to spend it in transit, in between places, to see your future in flashes, not in unbroken stretches of road. But it’s always nice to come back to your parents–that’s the real home.

Clotheslining Love Across My Room

So I’m thinking about revamping some poems into a collection, like a comprehensive thing, something whose pages you could flip. Part of it can probably be attributed to being in poetry workshop and having my pieces literally ground into nice little image fragments and thrown back at me. The other part can be attributed to this increasing feeling that I need to stop playing around at writing and actually write. One of my professors works a full time day job and is also teaching three classes on the side–Creative Writing and INTD-105 (freshman writing seminar), both of which require an immense amount of reading/editing/critical thinking. Being a TA for one of the INTD-105 sections has shown me how much effort goes into the process–and I’m not teaching the class, by any means, nor am I grading. But holy shit. This professor is also currently working on her novel–she says she gets about 4 hours a weekend to write, which translates into about 2 pages of actual writing–plus you know, singlehandedly caring for her horses and other animals, upkeep of her 3-acre property. If she can write, dammit, so can I. If I want to be doing this for the rest of my life, I’ve got to start now, and I’ve got to have some kind of focus. Perhaps another part of it is that I feel this tremendous pressure to graduate having accomplished something concrete with my undergrad degree. Which is unreasonable, of course, but I’m unreasonable about expectations in the first place.

At any rate, being in poetry workshop has made me see verse in a different way. Things like “love” and “happy” and “sadness” and “anger” get pitched out the window.

“Get rid of the abstractions.”

“Cut wordiness.”

“Get rid of your gerunds.”

One friend calls it “slashing-and-burning”–to get to healthy stuff, you’ve got to cut away all the dead parts. I went back to some poems I’d written last semester, this summer, this fall. To be honest, I was rather horrified. I spent a good half hour last night slashing and burning; perhaps saving a line, an image, but tossing a lot of the poem overboard. I had stanzas filled with vague images.

It’s also interesting now, to look at these poems critically. Poems I wrote in the middle of some desperate, soul-searching, obsessive frame of mind. Poems that felt like a surgical procedure gone wrong, like I’d gotten a defect heart to transplant my own, poems that bled everywhere. They were a lot of raw emotion, a lot of words just thrown around in stanza form, and it’s time to clean it up. To start making the poems less about me and more about an experience. To distance myself from the speaker and let the speaker take on his/her own persona. I can write from a calmer place now, mold the ideas into images that speak without telling. I think a lot of poetry is about the way images make you feel–and I know there’s so much more than that. But for me, when I read a poem, if an image makes me stop and I can’t quite put my finger on why I think it’s so beautiful, or stirring, or sad, or whatever else, I like that poem. For example, I bought Laurie Saurborn Young’s new collection, Carnivoria, off these first three lines:

                                   “When I say roses, I mean how
to change a light bulb with my teeth. How to peer

through a million wires until I see your fading skin.”

The freshness and striking imagery made me want to read more. I bought the book. And that is what I mean, I guess, when I say that a lot of times we feel things we can’t quite express. I wanted to write about how selling the house I spent my teenage years in felt sad but not sad–like I should have cried, but I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything, just a calm acceptance that this was happening. Or how I sometimes think that our stories with another person aren’t always over, even when we think they are, and how love takes so many different kinds of shapes. And how when I say “I love you”, it doesn’t always mean “forever”, but it never means that I don’t believe in what I’m saying.

So I’m going through the twenty or so poems that I wrote–one of my friends jokingly referred to an acquaintance as “my muse”, and she may have been right. But I think in the end, these poems are more of a journey–an arc, if you will, about trying to keep someone close, even if you’re strangling each other in the end.

**

Also, happy October, dear readers. I’m sorry I haven’t been posting as much. Excuses, excuses, but here they are.

Unleavened

Love, you catch me by my shoestring,
remind of me all my undone laces,

trip me up in the 5 am dark.
There’s so much in the telling, the re-

telling, of how I undid you,
like letting my hair down in the secret

of a five foot closet, making love 
like we were trying to wake the sun, 

who let us make our own light in cherry red silence,
heat filling embered skin. 

Fiction in the gold cracks between your fingernails,
I searched the library for your biography,

the space you should have been dusty, I
ran to the bookstore–

sold out, like our memories. The moon rose
honey-warm, braiding us

back together, we rise like bread. 

Congratulations, you’re an adult. So what?

You are an adult. Congratulations, you’ve crossed that magical finish line by simply turning another year older. You’re 18, you’re legal, you’re probably about to go to college. Do you have any concept of what it means to be an adult? I didn’t. Not at 18, not growing up in the small “all-American village”, in a middle-class white family in America. I went to school from 8-3, did sports until 5, did homework, hung out with friends. Parents cooked me dinner, paid our mortgage, utilities, groceries, kept up our house, worked 5 days a week, insisted on family dinners. I was 18, but I was still a child. 

You are an adult. Congratulations, you’re no longer now a teenager. Twenty. The word that is heavy with connotations of adulthood, from an America that perhaps no longer exists. The American dream: to be on the fast track to a career, dating someone seriously, starting to think about settling down and raising a family. “To be in your twenties”–it implies a sort of independence and a transition into the “real world”. 

You are an adult. Congratulations, you’re 22 and have just graduated college. Post-grad life. You’re a 20-something in a society struggling with finances, with employment, with overqualified people working at underpaying jobs. So you’ve got your BA. Congratulations, so do thousands of other 20-somethings who are pouring out of the floodgates of colleges all around the USA. Everyone has a college degree these days. Holy shit, you think. What the hell am I doing with my life? Chances are, you’ve moved back in with your parents. You’re job hunting, working a minimum wage job on the side, watching all your younger friends return to college–to parties, to friendships, to classes, to stability. Maybe that’s what you miss most of all: the stability. This is not every 20-something post-grad, but it’s a reality for many. This is the reality for this new generation of 20-something year old Americans. Society says we should be settling down, getting paid, getting married, having children. The American dream trundles on in the subconscious of our society. I think it’s time to create our own reality. 

I have two years left of college, for which I am incredibly thankful. I need the time. My father once said that college buys you time, more than anything else. But I also have a lot of older friends, who I’ve watched make the transition–or who are currently making the transition–to what I jokingly call the “glamour of post-grad life”. It’s damn hard, these days. There are the rare success stories, that everyone gripes about, secretly wishing they were that lucky success story, but it doesn’t seem to be very common. We are fighting our way upstream. I hate to sound bleak, but here it is. We need to be more patient with ourselves. We are 20-somethings. The world is our oyster; we are still so young. Horizons are still opening up and spreading out for us. We are mobile, we aren’t in a fixed career yet, we have that freedom to choose, to walk away from what everyone thinks we should be doing. So what if you’re a 20-something and single? You haven’t failed in a duty, expectation, or social norm. Twenty years old and that’s all I’ve ever known, and there are days when I don’t know if I could fit another person into my 21st century feminist mayhem of a life. Live up the single life. You’ll find someone, but you’ll find that someone when it’s right for you, not when you feel like you should be finding them, because society tilts its nosy head and asks why you aren’t in a long-term relationship with a ring on your finger yet. Hold up there. So what if you’re a 20-something and haven’t found a job yet? Money is good. Money is excellent and money drives most of our decisions and actions in this society. Yeah, yeah. The Class of 2012 graduated 4 months ago. Goddamn if you’ve found a job in four months. My father, 20 years ago, with a PhD. searched for over a year, before finding employment. It’s tough. You gotta fight. And you will, because you’re a millennial. We grew up with gadgets. We’re resourceful. We bounce from change to change like we’re switching lanes on an open highway. We’re adaptive, we’re entitled and maybe a little narcissistic sometimes, but we know what we want. We know what we think we deserve and we know we’re going to get it. Who can slam a little positive outlook? The trend for millenials has suggested a more liberal worldview, an emphasis on being a team-player, and a more global outlook. Hello Skype, Facebook, Twitter: you’ve connected the globe. We message with people halfway across the world. We learn to depend on others. We’re millennials. We’ll figure it out. We’ll make our own jobs if we have to. So what if you don’t have your shit together? I bought a book called “Adulting: How to Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps” by Kelly Williams Brown. (It’s a phenomenal book, I highly recommend it.) Brown titles one chapter “Fake It Til You Make It”, which I think is pretty accurate. No one really has their shit together, some are just better at faking it than others. I am the consummate “has her shit together” girl and had a complete meltdown last week in my bed because I was suddenly super terrified about never getting an internship and burning out into nothing. I told a friend earlier this week that I’m pretty sure my life is in a constant state of chaos and mayhem. I do a pretty good job of keeping the chaos and mayhem secret from everyone else. I’m just better at faking my shit. That’s all it is. 

If society says that if you’re a 20-something and need to be on a career path, seriously dating, and thinking about settling down with all your shit together, society needs to a) take a good hard look at the reality surrounding us in 2013, and b) go fuck itself really hard, because that’s not how this works anymore. We’re redefining adulthood, what it means to be an adult, what it means to be a man or a woman, and what we can do with a college degree. In the 1980’s, when a lot of our parents were entering college, the average college enrollment was about 12,000. This year, the estimation was a little under 22,000. (Statista.com) That’s almost doubled in numbers. (Granted, yes, we also do have a bigger population than in 1980, but the trend has definitely shifted towards the “graduate high school, enter college, that’s just what everyone does” mindset, in middle-class, white America.) So many of us don’t know the first thing about banking, buying a car, signing a mortgage, taking out loans for various things–actually, many of us, myself included, don’t even have a credit score–paying bills, doing our taxes, etc. All the things that as “adults”, we’re supposed to know how to do. Of course, I’m generalizing. My parents were sticklers about me managing my own bank account and managing bills. I do, however, still go run and whine to my dad every April about taxes. 

We’re adults trying to figure out how to be adults, what that even means. We’re getting there, but the world isn’t making it easy right now. Not one single person has the right answer or even an answer. So dear 20-somethings of the world, please stop beating yourself up. Please don’t feel like you should be somewhere you’re not, like you’re failing because you’ve moved back home, and are trying to figure out what’s next. And please don’t think this is forever, because, dear 20-somethings? I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you, but we’re the next generation. We’ve got this world in our hands and we’re gonna shake things up.

Tin Cans & String

Call me, I said, knowing
you wouldn’t, because voice to ear
to voice frightened you, too
intimate; you thought holding
hands made you a captive.

You rang thirty seconds
later, you were headed for the iceberg,
and I was the rescue
SOS blaring from you, unsinkable.
We both knew your lifeboats were full
of holes. Your voice crackled in,
Morse code urgency I couldn’t decipher
you–the new language
whose words I kept forgetting, your vocabulary
a practice in one word sentences.

The rain is a Rorschach test against my window,
we pressed our faces against the glass,
trying to come in, trying
to see what the other saw. Nothing
but smudges in the morning and I was on
high land. I prayed the flood hadn’t taken you away.

I tossed my tin can and string
across the fence, tying yards
and yards together so it would reach.
Call me, I said, knowing
it was our lifeline, our private call
line, ours.

Lock & Key

So here we go again–
opened you up and tried to match
your parts with mine, like zipping up
a child’s winter jacket:
ours was broken. Like I knew
which key went in your lock,
like we were trying to enter the wrong house,
alarms blaring. 

So here we go again–
unfinished, as if you were the last missing piece
in the dinosaur jigsaw puzzle my nephew gave me
for Christmas last year, the piece that rolled
under the couch and got eaten by our resident mice–
I never found you.

So here we go again–
unsmiling, as if you forgot the punch line to me,
what made me funny–stand out
to you, so you repeated it to every person you knew.
I wore thin,
like your gray sweater that I wore to bed,
because I wanted you close to my skin when I slept,
even if you were oceans away.

So here we go again–
and you look like you’re trying to remember my name,
but I know you wore it on your finger 
for a year or five, before you gave
it back to me, and I had to relearn
how it sounded in my mouth all over again.
I closed up for awhile, 
didn’t let anyone see the way I worked,
and I know you changed
your locks, because I stopped by last week,
to give back the sweater I found under the bed.
But a blonde answered the door
when my key jammed, and I left 
it there for you,
so I could catch the next train home,
to finish the jungle jigsaw I started
the night you didn’t laugh at my joke.

So here we go again–
and the mice are whispering under my floral couch,
the one you hated because secretly,
it reminded you of all the flowers
you never gave me.
And your key is rattling in my lock,
but your box of things is outside the door.
You never thought that my locks
could change too.

Trails Home

I shred my fingers in absolution,  because if I leave
you a trail of DNA, maybe you’ll find your way
back to me, Every fingerprint is unique:
would you still remember mine?
I have never fought
to make anything so permanent as I tried
to make us, your name in every war cry. 

I made my confession, forgive me,
I couldn’t hold my peace. But my days
are lonely without someone to whisper to, brother-
close. So here’s my penance-
I step into an echo now, when I call your name.
No one answers back. We’re growing up, I’m getting lost
in the million faces of your city.

All my friends call us elastic, like rubber
bands  springing back together
after being stretched apart. But I never wanted
to be this far away from you. It’s like I’m missing
a second heartbeat, it’s like I’m always missing,
missing you.