I’m getting married in 42 days.
The comments and squealing and questions have already been hilarious. “What?!” is the most common, especially at college. “Are you guys going to live together after you get married??” is my personal favorite to cackle at.
(Yes. The answer is yes.)
Imprints
baseball diamond stitching
traces up a puckered seam
on the inside of my right ankle
sewn and resewn: thicker and knotted along
three hand-measured inches as
twice stitched Augusts.
this was the year that I sang in front of people into a microphone. this was the year that I got my first B in college, had to sit out of a dance because it was too loud, and cooked breakfast with one of my friends the day he asked me out (and I said yes!). this was the year that I flew out to L.A. for a whole week, worked my first hockey game, and lived in a dorm with the best shenanigans ever. I watched my friends grow up with me into even more incredible people.
adulthood is a long, slow climb.
it’s an adventure full of mountains and valleys but nobody said that climbing was always fun. and even the fun parts are draining on your body, climbing up through brush and over stone. there is the rush, the push to get to the top of the next big thing, that saps away at you when you have to stop for breath.
adulthood is terrifying, because it’s the prospect of doing everything on your own, all at once. no takesie-backsies, there is no margin for error: every action is written on a page, and the world is watching you.
for my guy. and all of us who live.
times like these I’m tired of being tired. Sophomore year feels like a thousand doors; a thousand doors you’re expected to run through with vigor and enthusiasm! just look at the type of people who run for office on campus! everyone functions like that, right?
hah.
hah, hah.
today I fell on my face into dusty carpet.
after graduation, all of the cards and letters i received lay piled at the foot of my bed – until they needed to be organized, so they were piled under my bed instead, in a far-flung scattering of kind words.
today i pulled them out and started reading them (and in crawling to excavate them, faceplanted). i loved them all, and kept the most important ones.
then i pulled out my bag sent from australia, with all the remnants of my dorm room decorations.
If you scatter ideas like stardust, they tend to spill everywhere, linking the gaps between orbits into constellations. Sometimes they refuse to be more than abstracts: they blink at concrete forms and words, preferring instead to ramble around in your mind and voice. I like to see things in big-picture form: college is an exercise in details, and recharging from tackling a series of projects takes time.
In case it wasn’t clear, I have a fixation with stars and seeing both. Human eyes cannot see nebulae, true, but we are able to see constellations: so when I try to link ideas, sometimes it comes out as ‘constellation thoughts’ in my language. It’s fitting, because stars are so far-flung from one another, simple glittering pinpricks from so far away.
If days were charted like pinpoints on a grid, they would show a map among the weavings of the night sky.
blurry glances at the night sky – a list:
I’ve recently started staffing events at the Gwinnett Arena. And as soon as I learned at call time that tonight’s Gwinnett Gladiator’s hockey game was Star Wars night, well, I knew it was going to be good. Especially since the Empire and a few Storm Troopers hung out in my section. I got high-fives and fistbumps, people. It was rad.
My favorite moment had to be when I was asked, “You don’t lock the doors when the game starts up again, right? This isn’t like the opera?”
He was right. It was not like the opera.
How do you stop caring about other people’s opinions? Especially when they’re wrong? How do you shut off feelings of frustration when people don’t understand you and your desires?
When I was 15, I had the start of a hellish year. I grew up fast, in some ways. I had precious relationships ripped from me, relationships all the more precious because they were so rare in my younger years, and the aftermath was raw.
And somehow that fire burned my vision. I saw so much more clearly. I started to see people as people, as flawed, tragic, beautiful beings living in a story.
A spontaneously drafted short story from the beginning of freshman year, when I imagined someone falling in love with someone they had never seen. The rest is utterly imaginary for the most part: although a few elements are drawn from reality, I’m pretty sure no one has fallen in love with my voice. Also, photo taken by my incredibly talented friend Sarah. Enjoy.
~::~
I was a Senior that year in suite 207, with three roommates. The lobby and stairwell were always blank and dilapidated, unlike all the pieces of paper you filled to be allowed into the upperclassmen housing.
Room 207A, and there were two tiny holes in the concrete beneath my linoleum floor.
The studious freshmen applied for the first floor in this dorm, the quieter freshmen, with headphones and double majors.
That’s why it was so funny that I could hear you.
Sun On Woven Glass 