welcome to the best days of our lives.
letters flying back and forth, like trusty little birds, like sparrows: (always sparrows)
(Skein of skin is all too few /To keep me from you / But oh, my love, though our bodies may be parted / Though our skin may not touch skin / Look for me with the sun-bright sparrow / I will come on the breath of the wind)—the decemberists.
i’m learning:
—sometimes we just can’t find words. my creative writing is sleeping. i am okay with that. real life is too dizzying right now. my stories will be back. they’re never gone too long.
— life happens much faster than i expected.
—to trust. to stop the snow flurries of worry about future jobs/residence/timing and rest in God. be still and know that i am God. God has opened and held the door (like a gentleman) for every step of my life so far. nothing’s changing here.
—to wait. to be thankful for may fifteenth and the ones before. to smile happily because i am.
—that distance is a matter of the heart, not the head. the head, the heart/the head, the heart.
i’m listening to:
—animal collective.
—c.w. playlists.
—lua, by bright eyes and gillian welch (over and over again).
—the andrews sisters.
—under a honeymoon, by the good life (also over and over).
i’m thankful for:
—google video chat.
—text messaging.
—free time, a set of blank parentheses in order to recover from junior year/prepare for alaska/conquer long distance.
—my mom.
i’m reading:
—lolita.
—the paris review anthology
—and this:
HEAT
a mechanism:
where flames the necessary power to raise your temperature (excitement)
a relationship of equal ratchets to exponent tremors (mass)
a convalescence of whorls to the edge of the fire, an immolent (by degrees)
conversion: call these marshmallows that flare so brief & singe shorthairs (prostrate)
as salty water washes in;
& melt like the witch in a puddle of functions which (engine)
—geneva chao
there are some things you didn’t think you’d ever be doing.
crying a lot, for example.
(and the mind reels when you’re near)
let’s for a few hours pretend they’re not some of the last.
she put on a bathing suit and stretched on a faded beach towel while he ran a few miles through the town. the grass was patchy, nearly non-existent. it was the pale green of struggle. the sun started a slow drop, hitting them full and gold. when he passed, she pretended to read. at page sixty, a shadow smothered the print. she glanced up. reaching delicately for her wrist, he tugged her up. she wrinkled her nose. “sweaty,” she said. he tasted like salt.
they didn’t have cereal or milk or bread. “i wish we could make toast,” she said.
“toast!” he laughed and pinched her left dimple.
she made scrambled eggs instead, in a too-small pan. she was wearing billowy, blue-checked boxers. his pajamas were striped. and when the eggs were ready, they ate in silence, with full glasses of orange juice and coffee in front of them. she smiled at the tv, and at him, and curled into a ball, her stomach tight with sadness. it was ten a.m. “i liked your scrambled eggs,” he told her, when he had finished. he rubbed her ankle.
they opened the door, and the rain started. maybe it had waited all morning, behind tight grey clouds. they ran, trying not to stumble over the uneven brick path. she shoved books in her car, tossed him a final volume of poetry. the rain came harder. both of them, breathing faster. she shoved her last suitcase in an already-crammed car and slammed the door. he took her hand and pulled her under the tin carport. the rain roared then, slapping the driveway and the roof above them. he took her face and kissed her—she felt all the coming absence in the kiss.
i feel like i should be writing, but i can’t find any of the right words.
“There seems to be so much in me I want to say. But it is all so big. I can’t find ways to say what is really in me. Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all life, everything had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring for me to be the spokesman.” –Jack London
you don’t know till you know.
the world is a fog around me. i hate endings. packing feels surreal. i’m folding clothes, making piles, sorting through papers and letters—and i can’t feel anything.
phone calls to my mama, and waving goodbye from across a river.
help. all i can think about is may 8th.
in the tradition of this and this, goodbye junior year.
you grew me up more than i could have ever imagined. at your beginning, two years still seemed like a lot of time to be a kid, still. to figure things out. and now, a whole year has raced by me and my entire future looks different. every other year, i’ve felt an end, a rightful drawing to a close—this year, there’s nothing. there’s no sense of finality, completion, or accomplishment. maybe it’s because for the first time ever, i haven’t cared much about my gpa. maybe it’s because spring came too late this year. maybe it’s because i fell in love. maybe it’s because a summer in alaska seems surreal. maybe i see a different future now.
what can i say?
i’m not the same girl i was when i turned nineteen in august. i’ve changed dramatically/watched my horizons expand/cried and cried and cried/pushed myself/loved. some things are a blur.
i can’t even make a list or go back like i have in years previous. it doesn’t feel right. it doesn’t feel right, any of it.
“don’t go far off, not even for a day, because –
because — I don’t know how to say it: a day is long… ”
—pablo neruda.
he woke me up for breakfast with three men on saturday. we sat at a table, in pajamas and bathrobes, listening to classical music and discussing what makes a good stripper name. there was organic cherry preserves for our toast and breakfast ham on a plate. i sat at the head of the table in quiet observance. conversations swirled around me.
we left the breakfast things on the table and the dishes in the sink. someone else would take care of them. assumptions are a necessary part of risk-taking, a necessary part of love.
when the others left, the house suddenly stilled. we were the only two people in the world, and we had all the time in the world. we did not. we certainly did not. and i lay on a foreign bed and looked at his face and said nothing. we were listening to conor oberst on a record player. the record spun behind and above my head. someone else’s incense burned lazily on the mantel. we kept quiet. we were swimming in distilled sunlight.
what is there to say about simply looking at someone?
memorization, perhaps, but you don’t care about my polaroids or my darkroom.
after a while, the record exhausted itself. he gave me a pep talk. i stepped off the bed, and we took victory laps to our separate cars and our goodbye. we drove straight through lonely fields and isolated country roads. it was another first.
(as inexplicable as love itself)
i’m blind to almost everything right now.
not your heart.
sunlit afternoons in hot cars and all the time i know days are running, running, running away from me.
