Country Song.

We started running again when we realized
we'd forgotten the way our sweat smelled: grassy and
sweet,
like the front yard and side field
on an August day.
90 degrees but your weather app might as well read
feels like fucking hell.

All of us stuck down here,
running our lawn mowers over dead animals,
pulling on our knee-highs to wade through the swamp,
timing it so our feet squash the cattails right when the sun splatters our faces.
freckled
like tics on a horse hide,
freckled
like honeysuckle on the highway.

February 14.

(Allessandro Lupi, Identity, 2013)

I ruined every pair of boots I had that winter, 

taking shortcuts through the snow. 

The night always fell and falling
medic, clear,
too low.

In the Holocaust Museum, I cried 

like you'd said I would. I'd been there before, 

at thirteen and again at twenty-two.

The same reaction:
throwing up when I saw their shoes.

Wind Changes.

It was a year of wind-changes. I woke like a bird at dawn every day, rustling my feathers, wondering where the light would fall.

I kept trying to catch and capture my identity even as it was stripped from me. Burrowed in. Burrowed out. Called myself new names.

I split each day between sleep and slough. I'd lost my sense of wonder, and it came back the more I craned my neck. It came back the more sweet things I ate, the more songs I tried to sing in languages I didn't know, the more narrow cobble I climbed.

The year ahead is already halved and quartered. Hard work, hustle, New York. Then on - maybe Alaska, New Hampshire, Iowa.

I flick my eyelids up and down. I tell myself to be better. I delete the numbers I shouldn't call. I pack away the poems I shouldn't read. I'll get small and strong, I'll get more honest. I'll get less selfish. 

If someone were to ask what I wanted, I'd tell them first about the dream I had that I knew was from God: the one where I woke up knowing where to go and how to get there.

Then I'd tell them after that! 

I'd tell them: Life's been pick-pocketing me, but I don't mind.

On the first day of January, we drove away from the mountains drunk on muscadine wine. I stretched my mouth and curled my fingers - hands to the wheel, eyes narrowed against the dark, moving forward with all the fear and courage of the present and the past.

St. Louis.

I'll have so much to tell you about someday.

North Country Fair.

(Dan. Beacon, NY)

I went for coffee but couldn't find a seat. My eyelashes stuck together from old mascara and from the cold. I stood in the bathroom, waiting for a table to open, and shifted from foot to foot, holding the tips of my fingers underneath warm water. In church, I wept with my eyes wide open and my head in my hands; watching my tears hit the wooden floor of the back pew. From the alter, a young girl pleaded: "God, why do you allow such things to happen?"

On Thursday, Dan and I met on Ridgewood Avenue at 11:45. I got a too-big tattoo to match his: laughing at our impulsive need to document ourselves to our ourselves.

The week was pure shit. But walking home in my Michigan hat, head bent low against the wind, there was nothing left to do but laugh, count the change in my pocket, and climb the stairs to bed.

Back in Brooklyn.

I made this rule in the midst of some short-lived breakup with Z that I could never date another boy who slept in a mattress on the floor. It seemed to say so much about the priorities and stability of a person's life. Now I sleep in a mattress on the floor and it's the most settled I've been in over a year.

I guess that's what I've learned about rules.

22.

4:50am and I sat on a suitcase in the driveway, feeling prematurely tender towards the cool mist, the low-blinking buildings, the creaking backdoor I spent four months swinging through. The cab to the bus to the airplane all came and went before sunrise, and I hardly noticed any of it. I felt a giddy, quiet sense of freedom, like I was sneaking out the door after a one-night stand.

I turned twenty-two the next day, sitting in a Waffle House in my hometown. It was 12:15, and all I could do was try to keep my eyes open.

I think back over the year, and have to laugh at all the hair-brained scheming, and the skin-of-my-teeth adventures. I've never felt such intense emotions, never cried so much, never wondered at the world with such depth.

All in all, I'm writing it off as a success. I visited four countries, lived in five different cities, made a handful of new friends that I'll cherish for years to come. I feel more at ease in my own skin, and more comfortable with living in uncertainty.

People have been asking what I'll do next and the answer is so simple: All of it.