New Things.

In my continued efforts to revamp this blog into something a bit more eclectic and inclusive, here's a bit of a personal life update.

Working here: Hobart: another literary journal
Attending this: Anne Carson and Anne Waldman
Reading this: 100 Years of Solitude
Listening to this: Lurid Glow

(Brooklyn, April 2015)

Joy - Ludington State Park, Michigan

Holland, MI.

I was right about the warm weather.

It makes all the difference to smell the grass and honeysuckle again.

Georgia had little for me. But Lake Michigan makes me miss the gulf.

Maybe its all gotten to be too much. Montauk last summer, the river in Antwerp, the canals in Amsterdam, the Seine in Paris, the briny Pacific off the coast of Vancouver. It's all beautiful, but it only makes me feel far away.

I'm rarely homesick. But this week, the thought of Savannah makes me want to cry.

How do you be in love but be apart? My feelings for the South mirror my feelings for him: heady, lazy, thick. Everything I want to leave and everything I long to return to.

I can't distinguish the line between theory and practice.

I keep taking things too far, but never finishing the task.

He was right when he said "We talk to much. We think too much." My only response was to climb out of the car and pack my bag.

I haven't unpacked since.

But the weather is warm, and Joy and I are going camping today.

If growth is happening, its happening in these simple tasks my dad never quite taught me to do: chopping fire wood, driving the highway, pitching a tent, loving and not leaving.

A Privilege, Not A Loss.

I sat in the kitchen at 260 Pacific Street. The open windows reminded me of last summer: that same sense of possibility, that same safeness.

I watched my favourite movie while leaning over the kitchen counter. Sometimes I just don't want to be comfortable.

Life in that city is all muscle memory now. No growth or goodness. Still, it felt good to be her again. Tall, moody, sure of it.

I've been living too many different lives too quickly. The speed is disorienting, and I find myself counting down through the past months: how many airports, how many apartments, how many friends?

But the speed is better than one life lived repeatedly. That's what keeps New Yorkers young. Nothing changes. Every season of life is exactly like the other.

But I want to be my age! It was wrong to act like a thirty year old at eighteen. I should have known better. Instead, I skipped over twelve years of my life as if it were a privilege and not a loss.

On the way back to Detroit, I had to walk myself through it.

"You are in Newark, New Jersey. You are drunk and alone at an airport bar, but you are not sad, so don't tell yourself that you are. You live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You are twenty-one years old. You are not sad. Don't tell yourself that you are." 

Michigan.

(Miranda July)

It felt like an intervention.

Curled tightly into the couch in a matching flannel pyjama set; wet hair, dry skin.

I clutched a crystal glass of grappa in one hand and kept the index finger of the other inside page 372. It stayed there the whole hour, saving my place, so that at the end of it all, I could return to where I was and pick up as if nothing had happened.

I've been staying quiet about it, but they know to ask. Teary-eyed, I say something like, "I'm just gonna tough it out through the summer."

(I think everything will get better when the weather gets warmer).

I'm tired of telling old stories to new people. The experiences like some sort of bartering chip: I'll trade you this anecdote for an hour of your time. I just need a friend.

I've been leaving my fingers in, thinking I'll go back.

But where will I go back to? And will the words still read the same?

New Distance.

On the second day, I got so deep into the internet I felt dizzy when I emerged. Fasting makes you hungry. My head spun.

The coffee shop played songs I'd listened to days before, driving at dusk from Athens to Atlanta. No matter how far I get, everything is the same, down to the very chords.

I looked at everyone dully. The hope to change or to be changed numbed.

It felt too lonely last night: curled in front of the wood red stove, wanting desperately to lean my head against a friendly shoulder, or to read a stanza aloud.

When we broke up, we were sitting side-by-side on a swing set.

He swung high, rattling every foundation. I turned and turned, the metal twisting into itself with a grate and squeak as my toes dug into the wet brown dirt. When I lifted my ankles, the seat spun three times. The motion repeated was violent and dizzying.

There's nothing quite like processing pain in the midst of play.