Constructive Summer

It's just hit me -- I go back to school soon. Now is the time of the summer spent scared and frustrated: figuring out student loans, waiving student health insurance coverage, figuring out which text books I need. Summer has gone by way too fast.

I leave for Boston on Wednesday. I haven't been there since I was a freshman in college and my last trip was a disastrous one -- a last ditch attempt to salvage a long dead relationship, whole days spent locked in a hotel room crying, staring at my own scared, sad face in the mirror. I'm pretty sure that this trip will be a lot better.

Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, I miss Oxford. I miss the immediacy of it all, of having everyone right there. Being home involves so much work: phone calls, driving, disappointment. It's easier to walk out of my door and knock on Shiree's, to walk down the hall and see if Mike and Susan are home. I know that things will be different next year, but I'm hoping they'll be manageable. I hope, almost more than anything else, that they are quick. I want next year to be in and out.

I need to buy a day planner. Maybe I'll do that in Boston? It seems like the sort of thing I would like to spend too much money on at Black Ink.

Lately I feel tired all the time. I have to fight to stay awake past ten or eleven, shift my position, run my hands through my hair, rub my eyes. Simply sitting upright shouldn't have to be so complicated but I guess, sometimes, it is.

Waves

Supplies for the first day of work:

Moleskine (and pen)
Copy of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital
Aviators
Tom-Cruise-in-Risky-Business-Sunglasses
Digital camera
Regular glasses

Time to go sit in a basement, listen to records, and learn how to sell overpriced vintage clothing to hipsters.

Shame

There are times where I mean to do one thing and end up doing something else entirely. I intend to fold clothes and end up sitting on my bed, legs crossed in the air, reading poems about suicide by Anne Sexton. I mean to think smartly, to wash my face, to clean up and be sensible, and instead find myself searching over ear-marked pages, whispering to myself from "Wanting to Die": But suicides have a special language./Like carpenters they want to know which tools./They never ask why build.

Perhaps "Suicide Note," prefaced by two quotes (the one, attributed to anonymous, unfalteringly beautiful) is the most significant, and I would write the whole thing down, would reproduce it faithfully, but I don't think I quite have it in me.

I love to hear poetry, but can't afford expensive box sets of poets reading their work. Instead, I read aloud, my mouth hovering near my computer's internal microphone, hating that this act might be perceived as an exercise in vanity, as a moment of wanting to hear myself. I force these thoughts out of my head and push myself forward, make myself read, thinking the whole time of my parade of counseling sessions -- Arshia leaning forward and telling me, confidentially, "You know, I think this campus would be a better place if they built booths that people could go cry in, privately." I think of the bathrooms on the second floor of the library and the bathrooms described in Middlesex. I think of that poem Alex wrote. The one where she said that scars are just proof we never heal right.

The other day I thought I saw Britt and so I asked to stop the car, wandered through the back alleys in downtown Willoughby, pointing out old lives: Where Kate used to live, Bob's old apartment, and (silently, to myself) the restaurant where he kissed me, 6'5", drunk and confused, said "Hey, shy girl." For a minute I confused space and time, expected to hear the sounds of instruments and skateboard wheels, smell cigarette smoke and sweat. It wasn't her. I don't know what I'm doing.

Tall Tall Grass

I forgot how slow/fast summer is sometimes. Last night I had a nightmare that woke me up at 3:21 in the morning then, when I woke up for real, I tripped out of bed and landed hard on the floor. This wouldn't have mattered if it happened yesterday because yesterday my entire floor was covered in a soft blanket of clothes, but I cleaned.

Someone asked me what the best book I've read in the last month is. I just finished After Dark by Murakami and the paperback cover is fabulous looking and the book was dreamy and eerie and a very quick read, but I think the Best Book is going to be Birds of America by Lorrie Moore. I bought it ages ago when I went to Valley Thrift (?) with Brandon and Stephanie and haven't had a chance to read it until now. I've read one of the stories in it before, it was anthologized in a collection called Children Playing Before A Statue of Hercules or something like that.

I feel (just a little bit) like a recluse and miss last summer: weekly outings at Lure, the constant flash of the Polaroid, driving in Britt's van, 3 am trips to Taco Bell, late night sing-alongs to mediocre punk music, walking home from Frank and Tony's or Kate's apartment or wherever we were that night, pointing out painfully obvious undercover cops in the DTW. I'm going to figure it out though.

I'm trying not to think about school so much, but it's hard. I'm fixated on post-graduate life and have been endless searching for job opportunities with alternative schools in northeastern Ohio. There has to be something out there, right?

The new Tilly and the Wall album starts out slow, but gets good around song five.

Today I Hate Everyone

Now that I'm home, I don't know what to do with my hands. Now that I don't have hours of class time to kill, I never write in my journal. In some ways, I miss working in the writing center -- spending hours listening to music and reading old issues of The Verse Marauders online.

Lately, I cannot stop thinking about Bad Things, but they are never unaccompanied by the shame that comes with wanting to talk about myself.

I think a lot about that quote from The Secret History

“It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make up most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?”

But mostly, I'm happy.

Last Date

I am not afraid to ride my bike in high heels and lacy leggings,
but when I show up to practice reading poetry and you are there,
I am terrified.
You are not supposed to be here, in the reading room of Bachelor Hall,
you are supposed to be in another state,
working tirelessly on that dissertation on literary representations of death
or Chicana feminist authors or
whatever you are writing about now.
You are not supposed to be here, leering at me from the corner,
your hair shorter than it used to be.
Here was not good enough for you.
(And by here, I do mean me,
and, I guess, the university.)
I do not stay to hear anyone else read.
I run out of the room,
my heels clicking like the hooves of a frightened deer,
drawing my headphones out of my bag as I enter the stairwell,
and when I step out into the sunset and see the basket of my bike
overflowing with a bouquet of violets, bluebells, and foxgloves,
and a copy of the diaries of Anais Nin,
I know that you were the one who put them there,
but instead of running back to you, I hit play and
get on my bike.
Pedal home, furiously, the wind catching my skirt
so that it exposes my thighs,
fixating on the sound of sad guitars and my own heartbeat:
six more days, six more days.

If Winter Ends

As previously suspected, I am secretly still fifteen. Which is why last night I drove my roommate to the brink of insanity with my urgent, visceral need to listen to "Where Eagles Dare" by the Misfits. On repeat. All goddamn night. I probably fell asleep still singing it: I ain't no goddamn son of a bitch/You better think about it, baby, thinking of Paul T. last winter, "Man, I used to have the coolest Misfits shirt. I don't feel like I've had eleven beers..." He doesn't know it, but he was a star in vol. 2 of my college diaries, not because I wrote about him a lot, but because he said one or two really good things that will become central themes in some greater work. You know, if I ever write a greater work.

I've realized that all I write is short stories and shitty poetry about poor kids living in northeastern Ohio. Today in English, I wrote:

I remember the spring when they opened up the Starbucks on Euclid Ave.,
before Matt Bliss worked there,
where Kayla and I got frappuccinos for the first time
(scrounged coins from the bottoms of our lockers and under sofa cushions)
and pretended like we had money

And that was the May that I was fifteen, the month after what was, quite possibly, the worst night of my life. At least, the first worst night of my life.

The past few days have been fucked up and difficult -- a sea of final papers, bad grades, messed up accusations, and terrifying confrontations (I did not know he would be at that party, I was not expecting him to pull me off the deck and into the grass, drunk and yanking hard on my wrists and then my hair, yelling at me in that weird, quiet way -- it's not that he's loud, he just says horrible things and it's hard for me to call it anything other than yelling. I was so scared walking back to Susan's car by myself. I can't wait to leave here.)

And I guess, somehow, all of this adds up to me with my headphones on in the writing center listening to "If Winter Ends" on repeat and trying really hard to remember what life used to be like and wondering how it could have been if I had just done that one thing differently.