lilacs out of the dead land
Tonight after my housemate Winslow and his girlfriend Megan and I cooked and ate dinner on the porch – fresh spinach fettuccini with creamy mushroom sauce, steamed zucchini and asparagus and squash, garlic bread with more garlic than bread – I did the dishes, all of them, nearly every dish we have, so that they could get on the road, because they are staying in Olympia, because Megan has a dog and dogs can not stay in our house and Winslow wants to be with Megan. He’s moving out for this reason, which is unfortunate. He just moved in. But then he decided to be with Megan, and that’s how it is.
After college BandBoy did not want to leave New York, and part of that was that he Did Not Want To Leave New York but a bigger part was that the band he was in was in New York, and he couldn’t imagine leaving it. He couldn’t put himself first. But then the band left him, one by one, to Connecticut for med school and to Chicago for a boyfriend and to a solo career uptown, until there he was programming computers like before but without the rockstar moonlighting. Some people will never be the first to bail. I don’t know if it’s noble or tragic.
I’m trying to convince one friend, right now, to up and move to Santa Rosa from Eugene, to leave her house and her friends and bring her laptop and do it, because she is the sort of permanent breathless that comes from being in love in the spring. Salads and songs and doorways make her think of him; she is there already. And I am trying to convince another friend to have an Oxford in June, because doesn’t that sound like a thing? A delightful, low-risk, Audrey Hepburn movie type thing? Because she and a boy with an accent have been staring at each other across an ocean for six months now, and what’s the use of that? Why make things Impossible when they’re not? The world is not hurting for Impossible.
In another life I would be coming up on my first full year in Quebec, I would be speaking fluent French and heavy with pain au chocolate and doing God knows what; and in another another life I’d be in Chicago listening to folk music and maybe getting my PhD. But instead I’m in Portland, a city I like Best of All, still getting my feet beneath me and finding new places to drink too much. I haven’t found a market for my Crazy, so I’m brokering that of my friends. It’s good work if you can find it but if you do it well they leave you, and it kills me to hope so hard for it to happen.
Tonight at the bar I cranked my tall PBR can tab back and forth as always, saying the letters like I learned in summercamp, A (crank) B (crank) C (crank) to find the name of my love. And it went all the way through the alphabet, which is unusual, and landed right back around to the beginning where Disaster's letter lives. And I thought, as it weakened, that if I was gentle, if I was patient, I could engineer the letter, I could pretend that it was so. But I just let it fall off where it wanted to, one letter shy. And it’s a crappy metaphor, I know, but good enough if you’re drunk, which I am, and there’s that at least, for this end of April night of a year that keeps going like it’s going.
the difference
i had this conversation once in college, ten years ago, with the other guy, and he didn’t get it then, because he was twenty. it’s the sort of thing you’re allowed not to get when you’re twenty. but now it’s half a lifetime again later, and the other guy gets it but here i am saying it again (to you, in a way; but this is not entirely yours). this is a clarification, for this mess and others, mine and not mine.
you do not get to be the first thing i see in the morning. you do not get to be the first person i tell. and we will go hear music together, but only if you are free and if i am. and i will not make you late for work.
and you will be dear to me, and i will think of you well, but you will not be the reason that i laugh in the middle of the dishes, and you will not be the reason i look forward to my workday ending, though i love my work. and i will write you letters, good ones from airplanes with good pens on odd bits of paper, and i will choose each stamp for you as if it was all that mattered. but i will not hold the envelope in my hands by the mailbox, thinking of how you will hold it in your hands, feeling time stretch out around me.
you can tell me long stories still, and i will still ask lots of questions, and i will listen every bit as much to the answers. and i will still want what’s best for you, perhaps even more so. but you may not shelve my books between yours, though you may borrow them.
and we can see a movie, but it will be in a theater, and we can make dinner but we will not wake up and go to the farmer’s market for the ingredients, you will not get me coffee there, i will not tell you about radishes. i will not hold the eggs while you go back for more goat cheese. it’s just not what we’ll do. we’ll be doing other things.
and we will be fine with this, you and i, we will feel no loss and this saddens me most of all.
and i will always, while this is unraveling and long after, answer your calls late at night, i will leave my phone by the bedside if you are questioning the importance of your job or sad about the news or not sure of what to do next or if someone is making you feel the out-of-shape parts of your heart, is making you make the choices you think you can escape making. but it will not be me next time, confused boy. it will not be me.
the only way i want it
I know the names of trees, dumbass. I know the names of trees, and I can pack for anything in fifteen minutes, and I’m the best person to have around when you’re sick, hands down. I will never shoot down your plans. I’ll stay up when you can’t sleep. And you are undecided?
I have friends who have had choices made for them, big ones that no one was ready to make, and they’ve stepped up and owned them, and they are no older nor better equipped than we are, but here we are doing this bullshit thing, all pleasure no hassle as if that could last, all holding out like it’s out of our hands.
And I know that I am not always easy, that I assign too much meaning to small things and leave tissues on the table and am contrary, but really? Really you still need to think about this? My sense of urgency is maybe a mystery to you, and I don’t know where it comes from – too much early exposure to poetry about rosebuds and roman candles, I suppose. In any case I feel it, most moments at least, and you call it gravity, the weight of the world, perhaps confusing it with an urgency to name this something it’s not, to pretend some concrete commitment. But my urgency is the opposite, not an expectation for later but a preoccupation with now. When we are together I want to be there completely, I want to reel with the fullness of it, I want it to knock me over. But you stay upright with a vengeance.
Choosing is overrated, and I say this as an authority, I say this as someone whose favorite poem is called Both Ways. But at some point some choices are worth the aggravation of making them, are worth the loss of the thing you didn’t choose. And that point, for us, has come and gone three times over now at least, and I just want to alert you, Officially, that when this overdue choice is made for you in short order, you are not allowed to play the victim. You are not allowed to blame the universe, or me, for not getting what you wanted. Or for getting exactly what you wanted, and having to deal with it.
And you said before that you feel like you always disappoint me, that you feel it in a thousand small ways, every day; but there it is, just that one thing, over and over: that I want to be worth it to you, and somehow, inexplicably, unmistakably, I’m not.
I don’t know how it works with good friends, the way you sometimes know to call them right when they are eating gnocchi three thousand miles away and telling a story about you (and the place you used to go together for gnocchi), the way they text message out of the blue I sure enjoyed your blog today right when you’ve decided to retire from self-absorbed ranting, the way you know from their email subject, News, what the news is. The way they send just the right poem, on just the right day, even though they’ve never sent you a poem before, even though they heard it on the radio two weeks ago. They didn’t send it then; they sent it now, when you most needed to read it.
Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of triumph.
And I haven’t fallen out of a marriage or even out of love or anything near so dramatic just now, but this is exactly the poem I needed, gray Sunday morning of a stalling spring, feeling newly and pleasantly uncertain. Yesterday I stood over the turbines at Bonneville Dam and despite interpretive materials and the patient explanations of my friend with a physics degree I really couldn’t get it, couldn’t get how moving water lights my lights, and that my friends is a puzzle but this, this poem in my inbox, this morning, is a sweet and marvelous mystery.
and next.
I’m just going to write one small follow-up to my last post, because it’s on my mind and because it’s how I figure things out.
I have been reading endlessly about the Virginia Tech shootings, and I don’t know why, but I have been. Yesterday at work, where I am usually judicious in my internet browsing, I loaded and reloaded the New York Times and CNN and USA Today over and over, and I came home and did the same. Yesterday I mostly wanted to learn about the shooter, to try to understand.
And today I read about each victim, I scrolled down their myspace pages and played their homemade mp3s. I just wanted to recognize them. I wanted to honor them somehow, and it was all I could think of.
From these processes I have had two unexpected and perhaps inappropriate responses, and I want to write about them. I’m not expecting them to make any more sense for it. But then maybe I can leave this behind, which is the unsatisfying thing we all do when we have the privilege.
The first response came from learning about the shooter, and it was, simply, relief. Because I was so very afraid this would be about something, the way people sometimes decide that the best way to make a point is to kill other people. When killing is supposedly about something there is such anger in its wake, and the anger ricochets and careens and the casualties build for long after the event. But here was this young guy, and he was just terribly, terribly, sick. He has been sick for a long time, and that sickness erupted in a tragic, violent way. But there is nothing to feel for it but sadness. There is no revenge and no martyrdom and no divisive backlash. Just sadness.
And the second response came from looking at the thirty two little photos and the hastily gathered facts attached to them, and I guess the best word I can pin on it is awe. In this terrible random sample of thirty two people are these thirty two marvelous lives, linguists and hydrologists who write songs and dance salsa, a man studying cerebral palsy and a girl in an engineering sorority and a dreadlocked activist, and a survivor of the holocaust who made his life in a quiet Virginia town teaching aeronautics across from a German class. People from Peru and China and India and Puerto Rico, people who loved the ROTC, and the Detroit Tigers, and God.
And I think it is easy to forget that in every thirty two people are thirty two stories, families and plans and hobbies and homes, languages and pasts and passions. I am awed by these lives. I am awed by how we dream of bigger things. I am awed by how we travel and work and sacrifice for these dreams, how we improvise as we go, how we cobble ourselves together from all the people and places we are part of, and the things we love. I am awed by how we try and try to make this work, though we fuck it up again and again and terribly, though we fail each other in unsalvageable ways.
margin
They can’t decide if it’s twenty dead or thirty from the shooting this morning at Virginia Tech; the numbers in the newspapers don’t match the headlines or the AP wire or the captions underneath the photos of law enforcement officers crouching behind dumpsters with rifles. The women in the next cubicle are talking about gun control. Which I guess is what lots of people are talking about, including the president, who is horrified, concerned, and “believes that there is a right for people to bear arms but that all laws must be followed.” That’s from this morning.
Furthermore, according to his press secretary, "Bringing a gun into a school dormitory and shooting ... is against the law and something someone should be held accountable for," and are we really talking about this, right now? Because I don’t so much have the stomach for it, at the moment. At the moment I’d like to go home and be quiet, I’d like for all of us, this afternoon, to go home and be quiet, and for the world to feel a little less fragile. But since that seems unlikely I’ll just offer out the unhelpful opinion that I am tired of accountability, that accountability is always and necessarily too late. And I don’t want to discuss gun control right now, because it’s more complicated than a sentence and because it can wait, I think, until tomorrow. I’d prefer instead that right now we all had just a little space of quiet to think about a bunch of young men and women, and all they probably hoped for, and how this day should have been different. And about how to have a world where we aren’t talking about the lives of college students - the ones here on their campuses, and the ones we’ve sent far away - in terms of plus or minus ten.
Big Fucking Flake
That is what I’ve become: a Big Fucking Flake. In my ordinary life I pride myself on not being a flake, but here I am late to work and missing my friend’s birthday and ignoring emails and not blogging for a week, and when I went to save this entry I was two days off on the date.
Because first of all, it is spring. And second, there’s this boy. There’s a small possibility these things are related.
Now then. (1) This is not some sort of Boy Blog and furthermore (2) said boy reads this blog. So I’m going to keep this short and vague.
Latest Boy Disaster resurfaced last weekend. (How original!) He got the appropriate I Fucked Up script from Boy Central, and delivered it in a rather earnest and convincing manner. But did I mention Latest Boy Disaster has messy hair? And what is a girl to do?
This Girl, anyway, decided, against her better judgment, which isn’t all that sharp to begin with, to ignore the obvious Big Red Flags, and to turn down a date with Celia's regular Danny Concannon, and to give it One More Go. One More Go only, after which an army of This Girl’s friends are poised to stage a swift and forceful intervention.
In the mean time, This Girl is, with a sort of skeptical abandon, enjoying a boy who, so far (this time around), feels just like spring ought to feel.
