It’s graduation day, a day that seems more important to everyone else but me, not because I don’t find it significant, but because I get to see O for the first time. He’s sleeping when I arrive at N’s parent’s house, so I make my rounds around the room and indulge myself in some food. There’s an assortment of delicious buns from a local bakery, chips and dip of average quality from Trader Joes, homemade mocktails on tap, and I haven’t eaten yet. The house pup greets me like I’m family despite the contrast of my southeast Asian glow to that of the Vermonters I love.
It’s lap one and already I’m questioning myself. My knees are talking to me like the old wooden floorboards of a house that has endured a million greasy footsteps while the cool Spring air has learned how to burn like hot coals in my lungs. The sky is so blue and cloudless so why don’t I just stop and walk and enjoy the vastness that is this life my life and oh my god my bed how I miss it so! I want to emerge like a butterfly from his cocoon and be changed, more powerful, but I do not want to change.
I have this insecurity about not remembering things. When I talk with people I want to perfectly recall the details of their lives—who did what, where, how they felt about such and such—otherwise it makes me feel like a bad person, like I didn’t try hard enough or care enough to give my full attention. Sometimes this is true, as much as I hate to admit. To care is to put yourself out there, meaning that you’ve got to open up your heart, something I struggle with at times. Old wounds. Other times I simply forget things. Facts and abstractions tend to be more salient than what I ate for lunch because they latch onto the mental models I’ve constructed over the years. Though I still like to believe that I will remember the way you made me feel ten summers ago.
Sometimes a rhyme is good.
Avoid all shrouds and sometimes
repetition too. Subtract words
as needed, maybe all of them.
Keep one ear close to the page
and listen
to the heartbeat
of every word, every space,
every line; see how lines
define
and break
and keep steady the pace
of a poem. And remember that
heart is at the center of it all.
One moment I’m a philosopher, all words
and fat with truth. The next I’m a poet
moonlighting for something new to say.
I’ve tried on the certainty of equations
since they promised me the last word.
But I liked the birds instead, every word
of theirs a spell that guarantees
the truth of my existence,
that truths are truisms
only sometimes true,
that Truth itself lies
within and beyond
what can be said
and has been said
with words.
What’s real
is not
ideal.
Peel
an orange
& feel
its parts,
how easily
the whole
breaks
apart
& still
retains
its tart,
perfection
an orange
in every bite.
Like life, you kept finding your way through my
walls despite how many times I squished you
nudged you onto paper mail to leave you
out in the harsh winter air, where confused
you wondered what happened to the warmth of
a home that once housed your black-red body.
You looked at me with curiosity
the other day as I was about to
sweep you away. You crawled along the top
of my couch, and when I approached you turned
your body, antennae, and zigzagged legs
at me as if you knew what was coming.
In a funny way you give my days shape
consistency in my daily motions
meaning I am not creative in how
I get rid of you from my empty flat
always with guilt and a pinch of remorse
because you are there during lonely nights
in the vents, hiding in the windowsill,
always available like morning light
to spring me from my longing, to wake me
into something just beyond the outline
of my well-traced but unknown interiorities.
Sometimes you read something in a book that is so moving that you can’t help feeling that something in you has literally shifted. This was the effect of chapter 28 of Ray Naylor’s “The Mountain in the Sea.” The book is, in part (there is so much in here!), an exploration of AI, octopuses (yeah, it’s octopuses, not octopi, due to the Greek origins of the word), and the ends that sentient beings will go to preserve themselves.
Sitting across from me is a child with a book in hand. This sort of thing fills me with an unreasonable amount of hope for the world. She’s engrossed by the colors and a sea of static faces, as if in rebellion against the digital ocean designed to captivate us more than the ocean itself. We are drowning in the currents of the former, without any sense of beauty and movement from the latter. Fully garbed in pink, she’s delighting in showing her mother and her mother’s friend the simple happenings that populate the pages. The words are animating her young mind and soul. Her voice has filled the entirety of the café, as she bounces between being herself and the seeming fictions. The line between the two is fuzzier than we think. I don’t want to moralize, but I feel that the parents are doing something right. I see it in the ease of the child’s laugh, the joy that spreads across her lips as she plays in the ocean of her imagination. It’s thanks to her that I feel my younger self has been freed to dive aimlessly into The Mountain in the Sea, to meander in a world inspired by our own.
There is delight in the way our minds find spurious associations between things. I was looking out the window of a coffee shop at a heap of snow recently formed by an overnight storm, when suddenly my eye caught it: a small white dot on the window, and above it, a trail following a sud of soap. “Baby making in progress” was my first thought. Baby making in progress. I rolled my eyes and laughed at myself. Jesus, I thought. He would be disappointed. I was then brought back to high school health class, which reminded me of the young female teacher my friends and I oogled on the daily like helpless puppies. I don’t think we learned much in that class, but I do remember how strange it was to watch the movie on baby making. You know the one. Heavily pixelated, generic voiceover, 1990s feel to it. We, the freshmen, were deemed mature enough, supposedly, to bear witness to the miraculous, complex machinery of our collective conception. I watched, mesmerized, as animated swarms of sperm raced shoulder to shoulder in an attempt to create new life, to give themselves over for the continuation of our species. Not all of them would make it the narrator said with dramatic indifference. But, as if it were inevitable, there would be an eventual winner. There had to be, he said. That’s the promise of obsessive single-mindedness, singularity of purpose. All they ‘wanted’ to do, all they ‘lived’ for (how lovely and unavoidable our tendency to anthropomorphize) was this. And, perhaps, to stun naive, unlearned high schoolers in Southern California. I was a hopelessly lost child who knew only of video games and brotherhood. That was life, just me and the boys (though sometimes girls were involved too). But perhaps I wasn’t so different from the little swimmers that trained day in and day out within the confines of my developing body. They were my first clue that you didn’t need much to get far in life. All you needed, maybe, was intention and the willingness to swim. How delightful it is then that I am where I am, a decade and a half later, giving thanks to gravity, a watermark, a dried up soap sud, and the beautiful machinations that animate our minds.