Cheerio Fists

Dear friends,

“How far away can I get from confrontation by using the language of inquiry? ” - Claudia Rankine

I’ve not properly sat down to unspool my thoughts since I began school last January. Writing again feels like scraping the kitchen sink clean, finally, beetle shells falling out of dusty wings. I am writing for the first time in forever and it feels like stretching towards the moon. It feels like coming home to a hug. Still, there is something to be said for willful obliviousness. Is there anything more haunted (or haunting) than the people we once were? I know I never wanted to make time to confront the things I encountered and consequently, there is now much for me to write about.

From the top, then?

I dreamt a lot last spring. I dreamt of does and their crisp hooves, and peacocks tucked in the hollows of deadened trunks, crowns lopped off. I dreamt of wolves and sticker-style RVs—you know the kind: the orange topped, golden glow California surfer dude type. I dreamt of clipping apart dollar store slip-on wings and hurtling them in a garage. I dreamt of leaving. How abandonment feels like affirmation, the ill-intentioned illuminated after all.

I squandered school in my exhaustion, sleeping between every quarter rest, every fifteen-page paper. I was too tired to do much of anything. Don’t you know, I felt so ashamed for not turning my camera on in class sometimes. There was just so much… muchness. Not even a lover demands so much out of you. But still, I I found myself so immensely fond of the strangers I met over the digital ether. It scared me. It still scares me. In the rustle and frantic braying of finals, I forgot to take my medication for a couple days, and I am properly ashamed of its injurious consequences. Think nuclear detonation, but unreasonable (but is not that all nuclear warfare?).

All this to say, reader, that spring sucked. It sucked more than I thought, in retrospect, but also less. Truth be told, I can’t remember very much of it; the season passed by in a vicious blur. But it was also obstinately lovely in its own right. Spring always is. People usually are. Believe me when I say I try my best not to write about you. It feels so right, like wanting to press flowers in a phonebook. Preservation, not possession. Does that make sense?

***

Paper stars and paper cranes littered my tabletops a week before I left home, twinkling betwixt the coffee stains. I packed within a matter of days, snapped up everything like the tongue of a measuring tape. I am a procrastinator at heart, I think. It is a terrible thing to be.

As of this writing, I have been in New York for just over seventy-two hours. Here I am, a mostly finished quart of water sitting uncapped next to my laptop, internet cables making my bookshelf an android Rapunzel’s tower. The wrapping around my laptop charger is splitting. I think of the girl who was electrocuted to death in her sleep because of an unraveling phone charger. I am eating grapes out of a humidifier tank and trying to see how high I can stack my pile of emptied Amazon boxes (this is what years of Tetris and Jenga have taught me). My heart aches terribly for home and it unfurls outwardly as restlessness. I miss my family. I miss my dog and bed and harp and the sunflowers on my former kitchen counter. But I have a lemon slice carpet and internet and Spongebob shoes and a hot water boiler for tea. I have the best students. I almost have pillows and a Swiffer and I am listening to oldies while writing.

As I wandered the streets of Times Square, I felt a sense of skittishness and a bristling fierceness. Inasmuch as I am a paragraph person, I am also a list person. I think I could spend the rest of my days chasing down a to-do list, trying to know know New York. I am trying to let go of my obsession with crossing off list items. I am (still) trying to come to terms with the concept of touch, of atomic closeness and distance. I want to let go of this obsessive need to know, unclench my toddler fingers around the dry Cheerios in my hammy fist. Chen Chen says it more than well:

Don’t be a stranger, but be

strange. Come by often for a cup of tea,

in all your unbridled unknowability.

I burst into tears on my first night here, scrunched up against the slim wall next to my sink and my sumo wrestler of a suitcase. And I still walk the streets like the world’s bitchiest tourist: forever lost but also looking like I want to pick a fight I’d lose.

The rain outside has stopped. I have a warm cup of tea in hand and a couple squares of Swiss chocolate in my fridge. Somehow, I think it’ll be alright.

Fondly,

T.

+ this&that: On Site Opera’s “The Road We Came” & the poem it came from, sumo oranges, silly musical puns, “a poem written by a bear,” and body farms