me and my love went sailing…

i’m dreaming these days of painting walls and hanging photographs. of reading vogue and virginia woolf on hot afternoons with the sunlight pouring full in through the window. dreaming of being called darling, and of modern vases of white peonies at the height of their bloom. i think i would lie in white sheets, with the fan on overhead, and slowly cross my summer-smooth legs. if i answered a phone at all, it would be only a real phone, the house extension with a long, spiraling cord.

it’s these endless days at home, i think. they’re so perfectly clutter-free that my mind floats around everywhere, a sailboat in deep azure. after coffee with an old friend today, i felt a sweet rush of contentment with my own life, my own friends. my long drives, my pasture club, my own cozy bed with quilts and secrets. funny how a pair once so inseparable can split into such dramatically opposite directions.

i thought when i came home that it’d be same. but everyone here is changing just like everyone, everywhere else. just like me. how can i fault them? i’m instead an island in the midst of all this transition, watching curiously. my family’s lives have moved on without me–as it should be. when i come home, it’s something like a boulder in a stream…the current simply swirls around it. nothing too sad about this, really, cause this is life…just a little twinge, occasionally. but i am watching my sister absolutely shine, and my little brother grow tall, and my mother start bravely off in a new career. knowing, all the while, that my own nervous, transition is only two years away, but excelling at postponing that thought with summer reading lists and bike rides.

(i miss having poems in the tips of my fingers and always just behind my eyelids)

above all, i read.
i’ve read quite a lot since last tuesday:
runaway, song of solomon, life class, the bell jar, how to breathe underwater, extremely loud and incredibly close, interpreter of maladies, the great man. (i am a fast reader).

i waste time on the all important facebook.
next, i read blogs. i have a few favorites.
then, i twitter, and browse stranger’s blogs, collective art.
like these:
1., 2., 3., 4. just for example…

i ride my vintage blue Schwinn down a main road every day,
smiling cause sumter people laugh at me,
and cursing myself for being so ridiculously out of shape.

i wash dishes.
i love it. the ritual of putting things in order, making things clean.

i lay in the sunshine, getting that tan.
i pray in the sunshine and i pray on my bike,
or in my bed or washing dishes. praying for a lot of things.

i drink as much home coffee as i can get,
but no lattes. haven’t had one in three weeks.
oh my.

i hug my mom an awful lot.
i laugh with kelli and joke with a boy i call jack.
i miss kelli even though i’m here cause she’s always gone.

you know, the uze.

dear aramark, flu people, the IRS, and any other kind sirs:

I WANT MY MONEY. you all have my address. please get on top (that’s what she said) of moving that check from your desks to my mailbox. have a lovely day, and thanks.

yours (rather desperately),
kathryn.

oh the glory of travel.
of places, things.
getting away.

spent the weekend in charleston. felt myself being quiet, and i couldn’t pull myself out of it. i was too immersed in my thoughts, i suppose. we walked the cobbled streets of downtown charleston…stood staring at narrow, million dollar homes. i thought about how i want to paint the ceiling of my porch sky blue. my sister and i talked. the up and down of her life, the peaks and valleys, like a heart monitor. i followed that green line with sadness.

how must it feel to be stuck? i thought about as we walked and when we ate, on the patio of some restaurant, with rain heavy in the air. i thought about it in the middle of the night when i woke up to deafening cracks of thunder and wild rain. my sister’s phone buzzed with a text message, a stand-by, and i thought about it.

i’m sure this isn’t what she planned or wanted when she was eighteen.

going to coffee with an old friend on tuesday. for some crazy reason, the thought of catching up, dredging up all the stories of the past year makes me terrified. regrets for things done or undone? am i/was i satisfied? this is my life. here, now. every second that passes is forever preserved, and there’s no way change can be made. the present is the past?

i can say honestly my life is mostly beautiful.
beautiful, i’d say, in its deliberacy.
i’ve chosen all this.

i think this is my punishment for all those times i told kelli “your time will come.”

sometimes, i believe it is necessary to soak in a delicious melancholy. to be in a bad mood, for no apparent reason, and air out all the day’s disgruntlements. maybe your family or housemates will be puzzled by your sudden glumness, but it’s ok. don’t offer an explanation for your mood or try to seem happy. just smile, and take yourself to the kind of place where your melancholy can slowly open in its fullest, bluest bloom. the reasons for this gloominess are probably not silly, but if they are, it’s ok. sit in your bathtub, climb into your bed, gun your car…stew in your jealousy, annoyance, bitterness, frustation, etc….for a little while, a brief little while. (too long, and you’ll pickle in it, your skin pruning up like raisins, forever tasting and smelling briny, sour) and then, when enough time has passed, pull the stopper on the disagreeble emotions…let them slide down the the drain, a spinning tornado.

this should relieve that pressure, that feeling like maybe you’ve been cheated out of something once again, that maybe your life will always be like this, that maybe everyone else is too glamorous, that maybe you don’t fit here anymore, that maybe you’re being outshined.

because after all this, you will listen to death cab for cutie, or perhaps broken social scene (whatever does it for you), and you will stand up, close the book you’ve been hiding in for the past hour, and pour a glass of orange juice. you will sit in the silence of a late-night kitchen, with only one light on, and enjoy yourself.

God knows this blog could use a few of them.

i rode my vintage blue schwinn bicycle down the sidewalk of a main road today. i had fiona apple in my ears and a blue sky over my head. high school boys in muddy trucks came barreling down beside me, and looked and probably laughed, but i smiled. i don’t belong in sumter….what can i say?

that feeling of slipping between those incredibly soft sheets of my bed at home. the silence, the peace and quiet in my room, when everyone else goes to sleep. the glow of bedside lamps, the stack of library books on my table. checking off dr. jones’ reading list, and my own.

my mom’s coffee. something magical about it, like her hugs. both, in limitless supply.

driving to the grocery store alone, just an hour ago, in kelli’s jeep. the wind was in my hair, blowing past my face, and i had shiny toy guns cranked loud. the road…quiet, wide. i was the only one on it that seemed to matter. i could have driven all the way to new york.

this place.

i’m doing that weird retreating, withdrawing thing that i do when i come home for breaks.

i carry on the motions of an ordinary life–washing a multitude of dishes, running errands with my mom, reading–but really, i’m feeling strange, and sort of numb. and yet, simultaneously, i’m feeling and thinking too much.

i watched my sister with her boy tonight. smile in her eyes, but i mean, that’s typical for these situations. but mostly i watched him. he’s the first i’ve liked in a long while. more than a year. when he gave me a funny, awkward but not really sort of hug when meeting him, i immediately approved. so she sat on the counter, with my family clustered around her, fussing over her eye, a soccer injury. it was red and watery, and she was flinching as my mother tried futilely to flush her eye. i looked at the boy during this whole process. his face tightened a little with concern for her, my little sister.

when the worst of it was over and my sister had calmed down, and showered, my mother got up and cooked a breakfast for her family. it was nine p.m. she scrambled eggs and baked biscuits and interrogated the boy. he answered everything honestly, politely. we made eye contact sometimes, and i rolled my eyes sympathetically, for him and for my sister. but he just smiled, smiled. he did a lot of that, his eyes bright when he looked at her. the boy’s just a kid. he’s young, really, younger than she is.

i’m a kid too. feeling a lot older than i am, but constrained by my age. eighteen. that doesn’t fit with my life, my friends, where i am. i forget that sometimes when i watch things like this, when i envy post cards and text messages and certain “my jamies.” i am so abundantly spoiled (blessed) that i am stunned, a little, when i feel the occasional pang of lacking something (someone).

see, i was left a lot this year. watched people of signifiance fade helplessly away. they couldn’t help it; i couldn’t help them stop it. all of it hurt, but a few, a select few, stung, and still do, sometimes. i sat on my driveway last night, around midnight. i listened to coldplay, in the dark, and watched the stars. it was lovely time, albeit lonely. the music reminded me of people, of one person, singular. i remembered distinct, perfect scenes at night,

polaroids. i wish i had them, to hang on my wall, or maybe store in a shoe box.

you can’t manipulate time.
there’s no going back.
there’s no stopping.

i’m having to grow up.
people around me are leaving.
life is accelerating.

i kinda just want to sit in the middle of the road and cry for all the glorious times past…
they’re gone, and there’s no turning back. i’m stuck in this car, and my beautiful life is flashing by in a blur. i just want a minute longer.

i’m listening to my very first copeland song ever….sleep, from in motion. it’s a good song. i was at the beach when i first heard it. i was fifteen, and i was pouting because i was stuck at a quiet beach, away from my friends. now, i think i would treasure the isolation, luxuriate in the silence. i’ve done some growing up since then.

there are a lot of flashbacks that come in the spring, i think. maybe it’s like that with every season change, but i’m noticing them more this year. so much has changed since last may. i could say that over and over and still not convey the enormity of the shift. a lot of tears were cried…a lot for me, but more for others. i didn’t like that…didn’t like that tears were easier. i still don’t like the vulnerability of it. but maybe that’s part of being a woman? feeling more. i haven’t decided yet.
i just know that the often tragedies of peoples’ lives are not okay. and i can never watch people hurt and feel nothing.

so i’m back home now. lying in my old bed, but in a different room. alone, listening to copeland. a peaceful break from my kid brother and sister’s constant top 40. two years ago, i maybe would have been considering sneaking out. i would have been restless; i would have been angry. sneaking out–i’m having lunch with those boys tomorrow. memories of a far different time in my life…

in ten minutes, i will pull out of anderson and go home, leaving every glorious and terrible thing of my sophomore year behind me. i cried leaving A4.

i am perhaps too sentimental.

besides me, not a car on the road.
silence, and the evidence of rain.
drops on my windshield, glittering
in the red glow from the stoplight. 

one touch and the radio springs
to life with the sound of violins.
anything, really, to fill the void
your words left in my head.

i was so used to them,
circling there, like a dog
going comfortably to sleep. 
round and round, their
steady rise and decline
was as soothing as the sound
of wet tires on rain-slick roads.

but they’re gone, and you’re gone,
and it’s late, and i’m awfully tired
of (for) this. the passenger seat is
empty.

you left your keys in my car,
by the way.