The First Draft

I told you before about how the worst part of graduating is saying goodbye to everyone. Well, it truly is the worst part; it’s the hardest, too. As I was packing up my car tonight, I had a nagging feeling that I didn’t do a good enough job saying au revoir when I last saw you. Hence this post, over which you aren’t allowed to roll your eyes. Just bear with me.

I couldn’t talk when you left because everything I wanted to say felt like something you would say to someone you’ll never, ever see again, and that’s not us (I sincerely hope). But there is some stuff you should know. So I’ll just say these three things:

1. I’m glad you didn’t say ‘goodbye’ because, you’re right, there is too much closure in that word. ‘See ya later’ is much more inviting and if I’m being honest (I am), it’s much more manageable. I almost cried as it was, which is silly, right?
2. This one doesn’t mean ‘goodbye’ anymore than ‘see ya later’ means ‘goodbye,’ so don’t read it like that. I just want you to know that I’m really, really glad we got to be such good friends. If it weren’t so cheesy, I would talk about how friendship’s all about accepting a person and all of their faults. But it is cheesy, so I’m just gonna let that kind of sideways mention of it count as me talking about it. Point is, you get me and I get you and that’s made being friends pretty friggin’ easy/awesome.
3. My not being around anymore (but really, I’m only 2.5 hours away) is no license to slack off on any of our mutual endeavors (i.e. this First Draft project, Infinite Jest, etc.) or to forget any of our  maybe-someday projects (i.e. trading books via media mail, Dog-Eared Books [still a thing, San Francisco be damned], etc.).

Ok, that about covers it. Painless, right? And only slightly ridiculous. Have a hot chocolate at Caffè Driade for me sometime, hon. And stay in touch (we will, I’m not even worried about it. I flutter-hands it away.).

Oh! Almost forgot–someday in the not-too-distant future, you will receive via text a picture of a puppy. It will be my new puppy. You will be puppy-bombed. Get excited.

I am eating dinner with a good friend of mine who’s just finished his final music composition project. We’re catching up one last time before graduation and we’re at our favorite haunt — the restaurant with Mediterranean food and fresh-baked pita and a handful of outdoor tables. Inexplicably, instead of filling me in on his life, he wants to discuss musicals.

I feel a bit guilty when my attention begins to wander. It’s nearly immediate. Oops.

They’re unbearably cute, this couple sitting a few tables down from us. They keep hitting lulls in their conversation; both seem comfortable in the silences, but they also seem expectant. During one such lapse, the girl, with deep auburn hair that glints copper in the sunlight, has her hand poised near her tea glass; her motion arrested by the boy’s startlingly blue eyes. So many beads of condensation slide down the glass, reflecting the image so many times. Though I can’t see her face, I can tell by his intensity that they’re in one of the silences, probably staring unabashedly, imploringly into each others’ eyes.

The Chileans have a word for such a stare, which succinctly summarizes the wanting, the fear, the hope: mamihlapinatapai. We don’t have a comparable word in English, but the gist is it’s a noun representing the look two would-be lovers exchange when they each want the other to initiate. Of course, as I describe like that, in the relatively abrasive and too-suggestive English, the moment is robbed of its integrity. As a casual bystander, I don’t feel comfortable rating the love these two are experiencing, putting into oversimplified terms of my first language.

Who am I to say if theirs a Chinese yaunfen or some love less… fated? How can I know if they’re feeling koi no yokan (Japanese), which is different from ‘love at first sight’ because it’s a love sometime later, a sense of an impending love; it doesn’t purport to be instantaneous. They could be in the throes of Norwegian forelsket. I do hope they’re in the blissful, magical, terrifying throes of forelsket — what emotion is more pleasantly confounding than the first stirrings of love in a heart that’s been living without?

I am drawn from my musings on which language can best encapsulate the moment, which word best fits their predicament, by a motion from their table. The boy reaches to run his fingers through her hair, to push a strand of it behind her ear. The Portuguese call that cafune and it’s among the simplest acts of endearment one can practice. I am happy for the girl, and for the boy, that they will not experience the horror of la douleur exquise; no unrequited feelings for this pair.

Suddenly, I am ashamed of how long I have been intruding on this moment of theirs. I look away and tune back into my friend’s rant on the philosophy behind Stephen Sondheim’s use of the word ‘hats’ in his lyric writing (apparently the word shows up in quite a few of his Broadway hits).

Yes, that’s right. Love without language is happening on this restaurant’s patio and I got stuck at the table that’s discussing the word ‘hats.’

I’m so happy that I almost have nothing to say. No word seems capable of measuring the state of my content and the state of my content makes me sympathetic even with words, so I do not want to burden one with an unfair challenge.

If someone had mined the deepest inner-workings of my brain and used them to script a series of perfect Katie-days, they could have scarcely done a better job than Impulse and Weather and Chance have done this week (immediately as I typed that I wondered about God and the possibility that he actually had mined my brain to create perfect Katie-days. Of course, He, in theory, knows me so well he wouldn’t even have to mine, He would simply know. I digress.).

I have been in a fairy tale, a movie, a novel, an idealized world, a Utopia. Each day has had its share of respite and adventure. A constant discovery of something, somewhere, someone new and exciting. The dear sun has even been polite enough to be sensational –  filtering itself through thousands of deciduous leaves so as not to offend the eye, infusing its rays with the warmth of happiness so it tingles upon contact with the skin. Beyond the sun, which is really only a miniscule part of the Happiness, there have been dogs and hidden terraces and green green green trees in peaceful, quiet woods and food that makes my mouth water even now, and the cool, fresh threat (but never realization) of rain, and so much laughter laughter smiles and laughter.

Really, I’ve felt quite like a character whose author loves her.

Reflecting on it now, I almost lose it, the Happiness. It’s such a damn shame we can’t live life like the films or the books. Now that I have, I fear I may be addicted to it. Fear that I shall waste away frolicking; but would that be so very bad? Dying in state of complete and incandescent happiness?

But, alas! The real world confronts us with capital-R Responsibilities and imperfect rainy days and parking tickets. Within these parameters, we can only be the best imitations of our truly happy selves. That is, until we’re given the gift of a few perfect days — then we’re actually free to be so live happily that we could die. And what living!

Consider this: the majority of my day, I am in front of a computer screen.  It’s a sad fact that A) I hadn’t thought about, as you likely haven’t and B) I haven’t wanted to admit to myself, for a long time.  The majority of that time is spent on the internet, updating the news websites that I must read and the social “networks” to which I belong.  I know what is happening in the Middle East and have kept up on the complex, multi-layered puzzle that is human rights in China.  Don’t even get me started on my obsession with the presidential election.  The truth is that I intravenously inject the never-ending stream of information into my bloodstream, skipping the filter of my brain.

I check the updates of the more than 700 “friends” I have.  Even if it is for three seconds to see if I have some kind of notification, I will check during class.  I don’t know why I check on my computer because my phone buzzes each time I get a notification on Facebook or Twitter—but I check, anyway.

I read achingly beautiful poetry seeded by both my own friends and publishers I have never heard of.  I look at hundreds of pictures everyday, of beautiful women and undeniably cool things, of book quotations and unimaginable libraries of books for decoration.  I can’t stop looking at the beauty, reproduced in code and over 256 million colors on my screen, created by the complex system of 1s and 0s, of codefied signals on and off that control my life but which nobody, nobody understands.

I read the 140 character updates of people I don’t even know and people who I do know but haven’t ever had a meaningful, soul-reaching conversation with.  When last did I even have a meaningful, soul-reaching conversation?  Because to be honest, I used to have those.  They would be on the trail, or laying awake next to someone, or laying awake in the same room as a friend at 2 o’ clock in the morning.  They would be in the drunken moments walking back when I look up at the sky and all I can see is the Truth in the moon and the stars and the somehow divinely created cosmological beauty that is oppressing my daytime, unconscious self and peaking at me through the oak tree’s leaves as I amble back to my bed to wake up and check the news.

This is depressing, I know.  It’s taken tacitly that this is how I live.  I can’t speak for you, but I can speak for the legions of people like me, whose days have little meaning beyond the gratification I get when someone reblogs me or favorites my tweet or likes my status; because in the end, it’s like all I am searching for is the power to be liked.

But it’s not just depressing.  There is hope in the beauty of sitting in front of a screen RIGHT now, because all I have open is a text editor and my fingers are racing to get all of this conscious thought down, and my fingers are snapping to the hum-drum sounds of my mind as it is finally whirring to life again.  And the irony here is that in these rare moments of clarity, of past-midnight philosophical wanderings and cross-drafts through my quiet room, I am using this machine.  Writing with a pen cannot keep up with the dictates of my mind and the snapping of my fingers and the racing of my eyes around the room.  I am in flow right now, and I love it and I hope for these moments all the time.  The irony is that I plan on posting this, maybe on Tumblr or on my blog for people to read and to make them think about the same things and I allow myself to do that because sometimes I have, in the muddied stream I inject, come across truths that have changed my life forever.  I’m not so arrogant to think I can do that for one single person but maybe posting it in a state of half consciousness and half lucidity will help me, the most important person in my selfish universe.

David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech once where he talked about the “capital T Truth.”  It’s the idea that no matter who you are, you are worshipping something.  I (maybe) identify as atheist — hell I don’t even know, because have I really, actually sat myself down and thought about that? — but that doesn’t even matter.  Because the Truth that I know to myself, deep down and only conveyable in words on the screen because I am afraid to say them, is that I am addicted to searching for something.  I search and search in news and books and social networking and classes.  I can’t stop searching, crawling.

But why do I search when I know something inside of me that works, something that makes the world really close in on me until I feel the vignetted corners of my mind focus on just one thing?  In moments of flow and not-giving-a-fuck about the stream of words coming through my fingertips and how they barely relate to the cosmos or to the conventions of good fiction or memoir writing, I have it, I have what I am searching for.  But for 99 percent of my life, I can’t appreciate it because of all this noise, all this white deafening noise coming through and making me walk through this world unconsciously searching, like a zombie or a blind beast, hungry and killing but never actually satisfied until I stop, frozen to the ground and time and all dimensions, and think.

I hate to think of unhappy people in this world.  Because the truth is that I’m not unhappy.  I smile a lot and laugh at myself all the time.  I’m the fiddle player’s rising crescendo.  It’s not some kind of unwon pride or stolen happiness.  It’s just that I think about death sometimes, and that I know if I were to die today on this terrace or this hill looking at a pond or in my thoughts, I wouldn’t be upset.  I would have no apologies or regrets to address because I believe that I’ve really done my best to be a good person.  I know it’s a fool who thinks he’s perfect.  But I dare not be the fool who can’t appreciate the sanctity and beat of his own heart or the dusk before it stops thudding.

–

Dark green metal chairs obscure themselves into the forest trees as I squint my eyes, trying to remember the scene.   I use too many adjectives.  This is our “geographical oddity,” where the trees and the christmas lights strung between them and the terrace all come together for something special.  It’s like fiction, where reality’s saturation is increased seven or eight percent, where I can’t stop talking about how perfect it is.  I could live and die happy.  I’m gushing now.

Up the hill is the coffee shop.  Someone’s Tai Chi instructor just phoned the person sitting inside the shoebox of a café.  He looks like a regular, and he talks softly like a European.  The barista, wearing a button-down and dark hair (why do they all have dark hair?), is thinking about his boss and whether he’ll have the courage to ask her out to dinner tonight.  His boss is a skinny woman with flat breasts and thick glasses and a tattoo on her ankle.  She’s wearing a slate-colored t-shirt.  She’s beautiful.

It’s silent but keltic music is swimming in my ears, down to the river and the trail and the horseback riders miles away.  I’m constructing a memory.

I get the sense of closing.  Not like when I closed the pharmacy or the front door or ended a relationship.  No, this is like those last minutes of daylight, after the sun has set but there is still ten minutes of in-between light.  It’s like shutting a book and closing your eyes, imagining yourself as the protagonist, or as the writer who in a moment of epiphany said, “Yes, that’s how I’ll end it,” and smiled as his pen took his heart’s dictate.

It’s the same type of closing as when I volunteered out on a farm in Hendersonville last summer and where, after dinner, I was sitting on the grassy hill with my notebook, looking at the watery glass of the pond.  I read the journal entry from that night, June 24: “It is a farm of 88 acres nestled b/w the Appalachian mountains.  Right now, as I write this, I am looking out at a ridge, with the sun’s rays slanting through an old oak tree.  This is the first day in five that I haven’t been caught in a rain storm, and I am so grateful for finally being dry.” And later, “The farm itself is astonishingly beautiful.  Lying here in the grass with the birds chirping all around me and the beautifully infinite silence of it all, I am astounded by nature’s true beauty.”  I’m a living cliché, I know.

I was in a rainstorm yesterday, the sheets of water curling around my unwashed skin.  I never rush in the rain.  And isn’t it strange that from that night in the mountains I most strongly remember the still water of the pond but didn’t write a lick about it?  I don’t know what that means.

Once upon a time, a cashier at a Valero gas station looked at my Coke, my credit card, my face. “There’s a $4 minimum on credit purchases.” Really? I fumbled around in my clutch which is ridiculous because clutches are tiny and there’s nowhere to fumble in a clutch and I knew I didn’t have any cash with me anyway. “I don’t have any cash with me. Guess I’ll put it back.” He decided he would just give me the Coke. I couldn’t believe it. (Isn’t that sad?)

Once upon a time, I ran blindly across a stranger’s lawn in the dark so I could sit on his elephant statue. It was nestled on a paving stone patio between two Adirondack chairs. I straddled the four-foot statue and patted the top of the its cement head until a light came on in the living room window directly to my right. Then I ran blindly back to my friends, who were waiting for me in the street. None of them had had the balls to come with me.

Once upon a time, a drunk boy kissed a bewildered me in a basement too hot to be pleasant but too fun to be Hell. I resented the drunk boy because I didn’t know his name, I’d thought we’d agreed we were ‘just dancing’ and he tasted like smoke. I had always imagined a first kiss was supposed to be with someone you knew, someone you wanted to more-than-dance with and probably someone who tasted like the color green or maybe Moose Tracks ice cream but definitely not smoke. That’s just carcinogenic.

Once upon a time, I was in the refrigerated section of the grocery store walking in circles because they’d rearranged and moved the butter. What grocery store ever rearranges? A lady whose loftiest grey hair measured even with my collarbone peered out from her scarf, sweater and jacket to tut-tut over my shorts and flip-flops. I should note the month was May. “Aren’t you cold?” “Yes, ma’am. I am.” She clutched her purse with a hand I would’ve said was just as authentically leather and hobbled away from me, shaking her head. I had my first ‘Gosh, old people’ moment, but I figured it was OK ’cause she was probably having a ‘Damn kids’ moment.

Once upon a time, the grass was tickling my feet as I swung lazily over it, secure in a tractor’s tire suspended by chains from a sturdy old oak tree. I was meditating at the end of that pendulum. I thought about how four years ago, in the same tire, high-school-senior me was fretting over what college would be like. Ten years ago, my feet didn’t reach the grass tips. Twenty years ago, my grandfather had lifted me into the tire after hanging it for me. All of the Is that I had ever been had swung in this tire. I recalled them all with fondness — for their naiveté, their wonder, their zeal, their silly sorrows. But I really can’t recall if they ever even imagined me.

I take naps. I take so many naps so often that I can hit REM in less than five minutes. I can nap anywhere, with any background noise, so long as I am cozy. The only negative I’ve found thus far is a propensity to dream and dream vividly. “Negative?” you say. “Negative” I confirm. The vast majority of the time, my dreams are predictably mundane or uneventful. I’ll lie down and suddenly find myself alone in a forest. Or in a building with white light and lots of cubicles. Or driving a truck without brakes down a red dirt road. But every now and then I lie down and find myself in a truly horrifying position.

For instance, yesterday I found myself forced to butcher the family pet.

Said family pet, a sweet middle-aged Doberman we called Dori, actually died last fall. She had chronic arthritis in her hips and lower spine that made walking a struggle–when she could no longer get to her water and food bowls, my parents decided it was time to send her along to Jesus.

Anyway, in the dream she was already dead when I found her, though still warm. As it turns out, that’s a blessing. I can distinctly see the dream image of her lying before me: she is on her side, I am standing over her, my toes are inches from her spine, I can not see her face. I do not, however, have any image to accompany the authoritative voice which commanded me; nor do I know if I was holding the knife when I walked up to her body or if it simply appeared in my hand after “You have to butcher her.”

What makes me sweat now, even as I recall it in the peaceful evening light of a lovely afternoon, is that I did it.

I started with her head, circumnavigating her neck with a slow, deliberate slice. Luckily, the vision had the gauzy quality of most dreams, so I never saw if I was making her bleed or if I actually severed her head. Once I had run the knife a complete circuit of her neck, I moved to her paws. Her lovely, huge Doberman paws. I cut them off where her rust points met the black of her body.

All the while, I wept. I wept and shook my head ‘no’ and said I didn’t want to do it and apologized and apologized and I’m sorry, Dori. All the while, the same voice commanded I continue.

Once her paws were lying beside me, I could stomach no more. Somewhere in my subconscious an alarm had been going off and somewhere else someone in charge of fixing the alarm had been dozing, but now he was awake and frantically trying to rouse me from this nightmare. I looked from Dori’s body to her neck to her paws. I woke myself up.

I was shaking and on the edge of real tears and hoping the dream would be one of those that you forget the instant you leave it. Obviously, it wasn’t.

It’s because of my naps and my dreams that I hate seeing dreams show up in stories. Well, really I hate dreams showing up in stories because I think it’s a cheap way to explain a character. Sure, a character might realistically have a dream, but what would it add to a story? What can you really, definitively say a dream indicates about a person?

I think they indicate shit.

Otherwise, what the fuck does it say about me that I butchered my Dori?

So I’m walking into a little on-campus convenience store for a caffeine fix and the following exhibits are in front of me: A. Easily six feet  tall, reflectively bald, pale, glasses, yellow-orange-blue plaid suit jacket, briefcase dyed mahogany; B. Probably five-foot-six and wearing a jauntily situated bowler, pudgy, not unlike a walrus, flushed in the cheeks. Both appear to be in their late fifties, early sixties. Overall, they are not particularly remarkable maybe-professors, with the exception of Jacket’s jacket. It is, after all, the heinous fashion statement that draws a cursory glance from myself. But what really engages my attention is the conversation. I’m not trying to eavesdrop, but, ya know, when you overhear two elderly gentleman plotting to set each other up with women, you can’t help but camp out and listen.

When I first notice them, Jacket is saying to Walrus: “I don’t know much about her. What’s she like?” His voice is thick and leathery like vellum. You can hear that he hasn’t smoked often, if ever, but you can also hear that he is — to attempt tact — aged. I don’t give much consequence to the meaning of his words because I am so caught up in the feel of them.

“I really think you two will hit it off. She just moved down about a year ago,” says Walrus to Jacket. At this point I believe my left eyebrow arches involuntarily. Could it be that they are hem-hawing over a blind date? I think to myself. Now my attention is captured in earnest.

“And you’re sure she’s single?” asks Jacket. Oh my gosh. I have to stop from hugging myself right there in the middle of the convenience store.

“Of course she’s single. She’s blonde.” Ha.

“Born blonde or still blonde?”

Their conversation stalls as they pay for what I assume is their lunch. Jacket gets a green tea and chicken salad croissant; Walrus opts for a salad. I am thinking on what ‘Born blonde or still blonde’ can imply about a person. All I can settle on with any satisfaction is that he is hoping to discover her age, whether she is a corn silk blonde in her twenties or an ash blonde in her forties or a gray in her grayties. Walrus doesn’t seem to know what to make of the question either. He pays with cash and collects his thoughts as he collects his change.

“Born blonde, I think. Definitely born single.”

“Blonde? Single? And she works here? In our building? Why haven’t I seen her?”

Walrus gets exasperated. “Yes, yes, yes. Not in our building. I don’t know. She’s in Women’s Studies?”

At this Jacket laughs and his leather voice sounds the way leather conditioner smells: thick, faintly sweet. “That’s the problem here, isn’t it? We’ve Women’s Studies and no women to study!”

They both get a good laugh out of that. I am in a little danger of laughing with them, but I can’t  get myself sorted on what I think of them and their conversation. It is both completely endearing by merit of their elderly status and completely off-putting because something in it rings too true to conversations I’ve heard boys my own age having. Do things really never change?

The pair ambles out of the store. I pay for my Coke and follow them. They are still within earshot as I turn to walk to class and I hear them going on and on (still!) about the blondness of the single lady who works in the Women’s Studies department.

I was trying to sleep on the bus today with my head pressed against my backpack, but I couldn’t sleep for some reason like I usually can on the rhythmic bus, and there’s this man on the bus from the local high school who takes an E.C. (NC’s term, exceptional child) student to lunch on Wednesdays for some one-on-one time, he was there and so was the 17 year old E.C. student reading a picture book and laughing, and then he noticed that my head was down and I don’t know if he knew I couldn’t sleep or if he knew something else but he put his hand on me, yeah right on my shoulder, and asked “Are you OK?” with the most exasperation and truth I’ve heard in a long, long time and I jolted up and said, “Yeah, I’m fine thank you” and the man’s teacher explained that I was trying to sleep, but thankfully didn’t chastise him because really some small things happened today so I had some big, big things on my mind, and, after, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much beauty there can be in a hand on a shoulder, and how it’s been never since I’ve done that to someone on the bus that I thought was going through a rough time even though I’ve thought about it, a lot.

The sky was getting dark hard and fast like a bruise.  She prepared for the onslaught of rain; summer storms came to the mountains to empty themselves of their burdens.  The smell of the leaves, the trickling creek, and the mossy rocks combined, but she also smelled something familiar that she couldn’t place.  Twigs snapped behind her.

She froze and turned around.  She was face-to-face with the sounds, the smell, and an old woman that she didn’t know.  The woman was white and wore red lipstick and had jowls that looked like they had been splattered with flour and trampled on with nervous fingers.  The woman hadn’t tried to be quiet, but Mariela still felt snuck up on.  The trail was a good half-mile off from the creek. The woman must have followed her closely.

Mariela felt her throat dry up.  The woman had clouded eyes — cataracts? — and was looking above Mariela and into the trees.

“You have come a long way,” she said.  Mariela was spooked and confused and remembered when she used to volunteer at the nursing home.  There was a woman there who would beg for water every time somebody walked by, screeching nonstop no matter how much water she actually had in the pink jug beside her bed.  The nurse told Mariela not to pay attention, that some people give up their minds and, in exchange, are able to claw into you, to walk around inside of you until you feel guilty for their dying pains.  Mariela wondered if this woman had given up her mind, too.

Mariela waved her hand in a broad, slow arc.  No reaction.

“You have come a long way,” the woman repeated.  She had a syrupy accent that lingered and tried to be more delicate than it was.

Mariela reached down to her jeans pocket to make sure that the playing card and toothbrush were still there, and she started backing away from the woman and toward the creek.

“Don’t be afraid of me, child.”

“Who are you?” Mariela was surprised at her own courage to speak.

“We are all unhappy with who we are, but you are here and you have come a long, long way,” the woman said.  Mariela was convinced that she was going crazy.  “Please child, be still and listen.”

“OK,” she said.  When the woman said child like a rubber band stretched wide, Mariela felt a strange comfort.  This old woman talked like Geoff’s grandmother, like anyone’s grandmother.