June Phone Log.

(Joy and I. West Michigan. April 2015)

I called my dad today.

I put my head in my hands when he said what he always says: I'm confident that you'll figure it out. You always do.

It's Father's Day and I miss him, so I couldn't yell what I wanted: I need your help! I don't want to do everything on my own anymore.

Sometime after his fourth or fifth brain surgery scare, (I must have been nineteen), (that first summer when I still couldn't eat or sleep), he climbed the steps to my room. I turned my face to the wall when he said: I don't worry about you doing the wrong thing. I worry about it being done to you.

He's always had too much faith in me. (That's a nice way of saying something else entirely.)

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I called my mom yesterday.

After I talk to her, I mark it on my calendar with a small blue dot.

I'd like to call her twice a week just to cry, but I don't want her to think I'm as weak as I am, so I'm keeping track. I'm only calling twice a month.

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Dan called from Paris. I kept quiet when he said: You gave it the old college try. You can be done now.

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Joy called a day later. Dan says you're sad. More sad than usual. Are you?

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I re-read that scene in Franny and Zooey -- that one at the very end -- when Zooey calls Franny from the other room pretending to be Buddy. Afterwards, she seemed to know just what to do next.

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Who is it I need to call, and who is it I need them to pretend to be?

On Decisions, Transience, and Faith.

(Dan and I, Brooklyn, Summer 2014)

I've never been very good at making decisions. A big part of this is simply that I'm a creative person, and the world is endlessly fascinating to me. My brain and my life both move quickly, and when I find myself standing still, I get bored. But I'm noticing my friends and family struggle with decision making and commitment lately, and while many of them are artists, some aren't, and they're still struggling.

There are so many options and opportunities for my generation, especially for those of us economically and socially privileged to have been born as white, middle-class Americans. It's a privilege to have choices, and one that I think every human being should have, but lately, it has also felt debilitating. For our grandparents and even our parents, the choices were simpler, and the definition of "success" more polarising and particular. Now, I can imagine and achieve so much. The world is smaller and experiences are more attainable. I'm constantly distracted not just by social media or Netflix, but by the idea of a tent in Hawaii, a commune in Canada, a train in Boston. I've always wanted an adventurous life, and I've had one. I've lived all over the country and the world, and I've been daring in my relationship with myself and with others. But I'm reaching a moment in my young adulthood where I feel trapped between the desire to continue to live adventurously, and the need to live responsibly.

The longing to create a home, to have my own space and life, is seemingly at odds with my longing to see the world. As it is, I'm stuck somewhere in between. Ann Arbor is a stop along the way for me. That would be okay if I felt that there were a destination. I've got "a stop along the way" stretching out before me without end.

Most days, I feel completely lost. But I've been taking a lot of comfort in these words from Amy Poehler: You can only move if you are actually in the moment. You have to be where you are to get where you want to go.

So, I'm practicing that. I'm taking hope in the idea that life always leads to more life. Every stop along the way is meaningful and worthwhile in its own right, but every stop along the way also propels us forward.

I would never have moved to New York for university if I hadn't done a summer internship and lived in Manhattan as a high school student. I would never have gone to Belgium four years later if I hadn't done that summer internship with the same company. I would never have gone to Canada if I hadn't read a book about L'Abri in a college class.

Life leads to more life, and I'm looking forward eagerly to what "more life" will look like in the fall.

In the meantime, here's to what life is now: a bicycle with a basket, four jobs, a front porch, an empty closet, a little homesickness, and the sweetness of learning to walk by faith.

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."