xlvii

“I hate Mondays.”

-Garfield

“I love Tuesdays.”

-Anonymous Misanthrope

            Tuesday is officially my new favorite day of the week.

            I can wake up whenever I want to, leisurely pour souring milk into the Styrofoam bowls my parents left for me, cautiously mixing in Honey Bunches of Shit Oats.

            I am able to make my bed, the one time during the week that I have both the time and the energy to pull my Gryffindor gold and red cover over the still half-folded sheets, performing this great tradition of my two-story-house in Plano one more time.

            The only class I have today is at 3:55, a class that is filled with good-looking people (including, of course, myself), Lil Wayne mix CD’s, and sometimes business or leadership related handouts. It’s a good day, it’s a fun day, it’s a day to relax and unwind and watch TV on my laptop and, above all, to not do homework or study or think about the evils of Wednesday and its terrible trifecta of sciences and math.

            This is my day.

xlvi

“With their hands they shall support you, lest you strike your foot against a stone.”

-Psalms 91:12

            This morning, with those damned proverbial butterflies in my stomach, I finally remembered why I am going to college: to get an education.

            It’s funny, though, this past week I had completely forgotten all about the textbooks and pens and staplers that I had haphazardly stored underneath my loft, I had completely forgotten the (supposedly) sole reason that I am here in this still-too-narrow bed, waiting for my phone’s Lonely Island ringtone to go off at exactly 8:03 AM.

            It’s the first day of classes today but I am not nervous like the four-year-old, the twelve-year-old, the seventeen-year-old I once was. I am calm, riding down paved streets of campus on the slowly-malfunctioning bike that used to be my father’s with steady exhales, treading my way past the brick-covered buildings that I will no doubt be very familiar with in four years. But for now, they are foreign and imposing, frowning on my morning wheel-sprint across their lawn, lifting the roots of their sixty-five-year-old steps to trip me on my first day.

            Am I nervous? Maybe a little bit. But I will not stumble.

xlv

“It’s a satchel. Indiana Jones wears one.”

-Zach G.

            After eighteen years of soul searching, I have come to a significant stepping stone, a fork in the philosophic road of today, a significant key to unlocking my inner somethingoranother.

            Let me preface this with what I know best: pointless trivia about pop culture.

            Every superhero, every movie character, every gilded idol of my Polaroid childhood seemed to have a signature piece of clothing: a fedora, a Sith deathmask, a red and blue spandex one-piece. It defined them, made them recognizable, exposed threaded aspects of their starchy character. And, now, I think I have found my item, washed and ready:

            Khaki cargo shorts.

            I cannot speak more highly of them with their off-white, machine-bleached cotton, countless pop-up-book pockets lining the sides. A truly masterful piece of artistry, avidly collected and then folded into scratchy drawers, rudely shoved next to my four clean pairs of underwear and ripped Batman blue compression shorts.

            They go with everything, every high-school-branded Cross Country shirt, every v-neck bearing the name of a band I don’t even like that much, every button down that I have ever owned.

            And I wear them like a superhero costume, my superhero costume, proudly and consistently, for weeks at a time, sunlight tanning my lower legs, waiting for everyone else to acknowledge me and, especially, my beautifully matching, magic shorts.

xliv

“Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?”

-The Doors/Val Kilmer

            I don’t know.

             I don’t know. I guess I’ve been having some trouble finding people with similar interests and goals and lives and choices in the viewings of certain seventies science fiction movies. I guess I’ve been, well, picky. Sure, I’ve met some individuals that I wouldn’t mind grabbing dinner with or going dancing in one of the many, many nameless smoke-filled halls. But nothing deeper. Is that too much to ask for? Probably.

            But now I’ve (hopefully) met some people that remind me about the friends I had back in Dallas, back in my old life, back with the comfortable familiarity which lies between 635 and the Tollway, friends that will laugh and cry and joke and on occasion get serious about life and put up with me. It’s a godsend. It’s a blessing. It’s comforting and wonderful and now I’m getting too fucking emotional so I’ll stop.

            So, today, officially and finally, I start my new life.

xlii

“The bitterness of studying is preferable to the bitterness of ignorance.”

-Unknown, at least according to Google Search

            It is 12:45 at night and I have a whole fucking book to read.

            Apparently, I am back to my old habits of wooly-eyed forgetfulness and yellow-highlighter procrastination, old habits etched into my tired brain like the wood-chipping signatures on middle school desks. So here I am, hardcover, over-priced book in one hand, recently microwaved Tupperware full of macaroni and cheese in the other.

            It’s going to be a long night and, armed with a spork and my trusty highlighter, I’m ready for it.

xli

“How could drops of water know themselves to form a river? Yet the river flows on.”

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

            In comparison to the Kenny-Baker-sized dorms of my high school friends, my room is positively enormous (almost Peter-Mayhew-sized, for those keeping tabs): miles of forested carpets forcefully pushing past fake, freezing tundras of marble tiles, framing an enormous space which, for the time being, is filled only with my blaringly white tennis shoes and terraced laundry baskets.

            It’s wonderful, ample space for my daily dances to the pop music emanating from the iPod plugged into an out-of-place, Art Deco lamp, enough room for my sprawl of text books and labeled spirals to claw their way from underneath my narrow new bed.

            The only problem that I have with the room, with all its ample shelving space and overhanging closet pantries, is the cold, ever-echoing water drip heralding from the serrated shower ceiling. Every five seconds, a single (and rather dirty) drop of buildup, of condensing plumbing faucetry, falls to my shower floor. And, as it pools into an unavoidable puddle, it waits, it waits for me to forget about it, it waits for me to step in it.

            But that is not the worst part, far from it. The sound, the crash after it hits the cold porcelain floor, is terrible, bouncing along the walls of my room, especially, it seems, between the hours of midnight and eight o’clock in the morning, creating an annoying rhythm of drum rolls, destroying the silence of the late evening, disrupting my sleep.

            And, while I’m sleeping, in my dreams, there is an even beat consistently plodding through every bit of blurry dreamscape, setting the tempo for the night’s activities, preparing me for the shower of the next morning’s schedule.

xli

“Is all well?”

-My mother, 12:07 AM

            “Yes,” I assure her through the mysterious magic of digital pixel letters, “all is well.”

xl

“The love you take is equal to the love you make.”

-The Beatles

            Unpacking is a tedious process. Every crease that the cheap red luggage has rudely whipped into my worn-out polos requires a good five minutes of smoothing out, every lost sock needs to be matched with its depressed partner.

            I barely prepared the packing for college, allowing my mother to divert all of her emotional upheaval into the buying of Pringles, first aid kits, and high-thread-count sheets. So, as I unzip and reopen and plug in all the Ziploc baggies and serran-wrap, it’s like Christmas, surprises of supplies and necessary-to-life presents  littering the floor like the plastic trash that I will definitely not be cleaning up.

            The only thing that I had a hand in packing, in choosing, in actively considering, were the two posters that are now poorly stick-tacked to my grating white walls. For hours, I quietly perused the loud plastic frames of three different stores, searching for just the right ones. And, after all that, I’m not too happy with the ones I chose.

            Tonight John, Paul, George, and Ringo look over my bed from the comfort of the surprisingly-quiet two lanes of Abbey Road, while Peter Jackson’s prawn alien outline tells me that, “YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE.”

            But, frankly, I have never felt more welcome in my life. 

xxxix

“I love college.”

-A. “Cliché” Roth

            The dorm room is big, maybe even bigger than the Plano bedroom of my yesterday.

            The dorm room is empty, its walls are posterless, my roommate not arriving until tomorrow.

            The dorm room is plain, no colors on the walls, no exciting pieces of art-deco furniture (unless stale wooden desks are considered to be “in.”)

            The dorm room is cold, the air conditioner is on full Hoth-blast, and it is impossible to turn the donkey-wheel of temperature.

            The dorm room is home, big and empty and plain and cold, and I am finally here.

xxxviii

“Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.”

-Fran Lebowitz

            Tonight is the last time that I will sleep in my Ralph Lauren sheet bed, the last time that I will sleep under the watchful eyes of sticky-tacked pictures and the half-stapled Megatron poster, for more than a month, two months, a semester.

            But, for some reason, I can’t sleep.

            My two brothers insisted on dragging the two family sleeping bags onto the thrice-vacuumed floor of my bedroom and they are already asleep, contently escaping the mostly-blackness of my walls with the breaths of the dog next to them and the analog ticks of the maroon clock, crookedly mounted on my wall singing them to sleep.

Midnight Symphony

It’s weird but

I’m pretty sure that when I fall asleep for the night,

my house doesn’t.

The groans of my brother’s four-toothed fan crawl down my hall.

I’ve heard it.

And the screaming dust dances in my nostrils and under my eyes.

I’ve felt them.

Even the bedsprings complain to each other, thinking I can’t understand.

But I can.

And so tonight I’ll leave my light on, so the rays can trace bags under dusty eyes.

And I’ll conduct my midnight symphony.

            Tonight is the last time that I will sleep in my Ralph Lauren sheet bed for one month, two months, a semester, the last time that I will lead the sleeping bag, dog-breath orchestra in one final chorus.

xxxvii

“Beware of the man of one book.”

-St. Thomas Aquinas

            I have spent today picking out the books that I want to take to college, each hardcover volume being neatly shoved into the cardboard corners of foldable monoliths, closed with the cheap masking tape that I found in the garage.

            There are four boxes Pisa-stacked on top of each other, comic books cooperating with the fifty page plays and the political memoirs (for insomniac nights) lying snugly next to Harry Potter and the Five Pound Novel.

            These are the familiar words and the dog-eared pages that I remember fondly, hidden from teacher’s eyes in middle school, teaching me how to speed read and comprehend, teaching me how to allow my GPA to plummet tens of points.

           

            These are the parts of my room that I am taking with me, sealed up and caddy-cornered into the trunk of the rental van, quietly waiting for the inevitable late-night perusals and that clear moment of recognition when all this heavy-lifting becomes suddenly worth it.

xxxvi

“Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need.”

-Voltaire

            After three months of almost-minimum wage work, I am finally done, checks quickly deposited into the unknown pockets of digital banking, eager to just withdraw from the screaming and whining and constant sugar rushes of the five-to-twelve-year-olds and find myself in college.

            So what now?

xxxv

“Why are there so many songs about rainbows?”

-The Talking Puppet Hand of Jim Henson

            Today it is raining and the sun is still shining, still shining as if it is blissfully unaware of the black drops that are falling on my new-haircut head and the newly-watered shadow of sidewalk below it.

            Its rays paint my neighborhood with a sort of eerie glow, highlighting the realism behind every leaf vein and inside of every plastic garbage can crack.

            It’s almost unnatural, the HIGHDEFINITION channel of my life, clouds erupting in alien shades of purple and orange, rain continuing to fall on me, becoming an effective shower of the day’s bike grime and child wear, a legitimate double rainbow (something I had resignedly decided did not exist,) spraying a dim splash of color over my ride home.

            When I was younger (not much younger than rainy today but younger nonetheless,) I used to imagine my life as a scripted television show, millions of casual Americans turning on their Vizio and Samsung plasmas, eager to watch every minute minute of this strange boy’s life, off-handedly placing bets about conceived love triangles and posting emoticon comments on dusty internet message boards.

            And this is what this sunny rain reminds of, this imagined set, built from soil and scratch, waiting for me to jump on, spout off memorized lines, waiting for the viewers to watch, the colors on their HIGHDEFINITION TV jumping unceasingly from red to orange to violet to green to blue to indigo to violet.

            And then to black.

xxxiv

When you look at Clark Kent when he's working at the Daily Planet, he's a reporter. He doesn't fly through the air in his glasses and his suit.

-Gene Simmons

In the early weeks of May, one of the tiny metal screws which latch together the two thin tin pieces of glasses frame rebelliously fell out of its careful groove and onto the unvacuumed carpet of my room. And for the past three months, I have neglected to get it fixed, quietly allowing the pair of previously trustworthy glasses to wallow in the misery of common injury. They are resting in the soft velvet of a five-year-old black case, serving out their prison sentence with chalk scrapes on the upper lid.

But today, finally, after weeks and weeks of personally succumbing to the blindness of eleven-o'clock, after weeks and weeks of quietly ambling through blurry nighttime halogen lamplight sessions, my brown, spec-mottled glasses are back in commission, proudly being paraded on my face as a triumphant Purple Heart soldier.

It's as if they never had left the crooked, bruised bridge of my nose, snugly and familiarly still snug to slow-wrinkling eye dimples. 

Whispering, the recomissioned, polished lenses take notice of the new smarting blood scratch on the upper left side of my cheek, resting and smirking, itself ambivalent to the scratch vanishing cream and Neosporin. But they don't say anything.

I think they're just happy to be back.

xxxiii

“It's hard to dance if you just lost your wallet. Whoa! Where's my wallet? But, hey this song is funky...”

-Mitch Hedberg

I lost my wallet.

I lost my wallet and with it my debit card, my driver's license, my student ID card. But I lost much more than that. 

Inside the creased leather pockets were ticket stubs, parking passes, Star Trek fan club business cards, memories of good times in the hot summer, memories that I were counting on to help me limp through the new BIGCOLLEGETOWN experience, the familiar, loved social scene of senior photos and scrawled notes acting as a black leather crutch.

But now I don't have this crutch, much less the sixty dollars in loose bills and my university Sports Pass. And now I'm even more lost than before.

So you can please excuse me as I stumble through dark parking lots of last nights, through forgotten cotton holes in my mattress, through air-conditioned grooves in my father's car.

Because I am now like a blind man, poor and stumbling, seeing nothing through black leather eyes.

xxxii

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

-Dr. Seuss

           I have come to the surprising conclusion that goodbyes said over too-expensive bowls of ice cream are considerably easier, considerably more meaningful, considerably more tastily heart-felt than goodbyes not said over too-expensive bowls of ice cream. Such a conclusion surprised me.

It also surprised me how well a plastic cup of cold vending-machine water complements an overpriced dipped cone, not interfering itself with the crunching sugars of the white chocolate chips and rainbow sprinkles, allowing me to cleanse my thankful palate and my ten-o'clock-tired conversation mind.

Armed with my plastic cup of reminders and memories, gripping the yet-to-be-opened hand-written letter which had been so nonchalantly handed across the table, I sat in my metal terraced chair, saying good-bye to my best friend.

And for the three hours we said good-bye, talking about families and vocations and religions and mix CD's, my half-eaten Cake Batter double scoop slowly melted at room temperature, the disappearing ice floated around in the tiny plastic cup, heralding the disappearing time and the watery advent of things to come.

xxxi

“You got designer shades just to hide your face and…”

-Mike Posner

We’re driving back and the bus is moving surprisingly fast, fenced acres rushing by my patterned window seat at ten miles over the speed limit. I’m listening to some music, my probably-un-polarized-five-dollar sunglasses fitted over the scratchy upper-crevices of my ears. 

Almost everyone else on the bus is asleep, the spray-paint counselors and the yellow-bandana campers alike, leaving me alone in the consciousness of the bus, with thoughts, sweat, and the screams of a particularly-angry Eminem on my iPod all to myself. 

And then, in the very depth of my air-conditioned contemplation, I notice to my left, across the long expanse of the aisle the girl that I nervously two-stepped with the night before, also awake, staring blue-eyed deeply past the thick, mirrored lenses of my sunglasses, trying to figure out if I am awake or asleep, apparently unaware that I am just silently gazing out the Windexed mirror behind her, watching the trees blurrily sprint by, forcing myself to ignore her and her gaze and her cautious red lip smile. 

I don’t dare talk to her. I don't dare let the girl who I admittedly think looks great in a sundress know who I am or where I am from or what my major is or my life story or my deepest fears.  I don’t dare let myself become that vulnerable once again so quickly after less than a week of faked collegiate situations.

It is because I’m not ready for any of this, any of these new interactions, any of these new girls, any of these long crushes and crushed longings. I’m only ready to watch it all pass me by on this charter bus of the next four years: disappearing trees and first blue-eyed loves alike speeding by in equal time.

xxx

“At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.”

-Joni Mitchell

           It’s one o’clock in the morning and I have finally taken my contact lenses out, drowning them in the clear chemical spray of generic six-hour formula. Someone outside my fifty-year-old cabin is playing the same four songs that every sleeveless-shirt-wearing-guitar-player knows on screaming repeat so, of course, I find myself blindly stumbling across the half-lit fake-marbling of floor, making my way into the song-filled mosquito night.

Without my contacts I am hopeless. Without alien pieces of soft plastics I simply cannot function. Right now, finding my eyes unarmed, I can barely make out the faces of the thirty men around me, let alone see the tiny bright pinpoints of the Palestine, Texas stars above or focus on the unknown animal shuffling in the overhanging branches. 

But I can still hear well enough.

I can hear the vibrations of  guitar strums and the low-octave grumbles of the Tom Petty songs around me. I can hear the worn plastic of the counselor's white guitar pick as it scratches the tightening stringwires. I can hear the laughter of thirty bare-chested strangers whose names that I do not remember.

Learning to Play Guitar

“You’re doing this for her,” I remind the

                                              frustrated me.

She won’t be impressed, though.

She won’t be cradled in my arms, captured by the sweet sounds

of my hand-me-down acoustic.

I know that.

But as I sit on the grassy carpet,

the browned instrument cradled in my arms

I let my fingers awkwardly meander up and

down the street of strings,

slowly sweeping away the sweet-smelling dust.

But it’s just not working; the guitar isn’t

                                                          Just isn’t.

So, I let each chord become a word in one of my poems,

fingers fumbling for a pen in the dark.

And the words struggle between the strings,

Transforming into a chain of staccatoed sentences,

Which rip through my cheap looseleaf.

I don’t think she’ll appreciate this

                                                This guitar

                                                 This attempt at something greater.

I’ll just give her this poem, instead.

I cannot remember right now because all I can remember are the bedroom nights of scrawled tabs and out-of-tune chords, slowly and carefully plotting in my head the stories of nights like these, where I would be the one leading the poorly-shaven populace with Oasis, Journey, and the radio anthems of other unknown artists, whose names I have long-ago forgotten but whose clichéd lyrics still live on through solely through my life-support flashlight campfires and fast-down improvises.

I blindly swore to keep them alive. 

xxix

“Just dance, it’ll be OK.”

-Lady Gaga

Eyeing their way past the strobe lights and rap music of the appropriately titled "After-Mixer-Mixer", my fellow campers are collecting new friends like holographic trading cards, forcing themselves to find their best friends and their future wives and their four-year study groups.

But I'm not.

I simply cannot fathom that the person next to me, yellow sweatband tied around his equally yellow hair, could be someone that I hang out with every night or discuss politics with over coffee or ask to be my tuxedoed best man at the wedding that I continue to merely assume that I will be having in eight years. I simply cannot bring myself to divest such a deep bond with a goateeed individual just because we happen to have adjacent plastic mattresses.

But this is the exact mindset of the collective majority around me. Not me. Not me.

I'm just here to dance.

xxviii

"Whatcha know about Clark? Whatcha know about Clark? Whatcha know about Clark? I know all about Clark!"

-Yellow Camp Clark

I don’t know you. I don’t know you. I don’t know you, either.

Believe it or not, I am not very good in enormous social situations such as this Noah's Ark parade of a mess hall cafeteria. Understandably, it takes me some time to fully feel comfortable around a group of two-hundred strangers before I can make my signature inappropriate quips or open up the personal mind book about my Toy Story childhood and my Cugat-cover favorite book and my unopened action figure collection.

But, four inconceivable years from now, I may know you, I may know you, I hope to know you, and then you will know all about me and my red crayon childhood.

I sincerely hope so.

xxvii

“Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known.”

-Smashing Pumpkins

Today was the last day of high-pitched squeal work for two of my fellow polo-swagger counselors, the last day in our three-month journey through the inner-hell of a seven-year-old troublemaker together, finally cementing the bonding of the seven, barely-above-minimum-wage young adults.

Today was the last day before I head off to the four-day orientation camp for my university, the last day before the first day of the rest of my life.

Today is the ending of one thing, the beginning of something greater and unreachable.

And I am spending this last day, this last breath of familiarity, this first day, this first taste of freedom from home, family, and gummy seven-year-olds, curled on a friend's couch, watching his grainy high school football footage, reliving and remembering and rewinding, before it's too late. 

xxvi

“Though a tree grows so high, the falling leaves return to the root.”

-Malay Proverb

Ever since the thermometer sticky-hanging outside of the house’s porch door started running a consistently high fever for the past seven days, I have been finding myself biking to work consistently less than I had been at the onset of the fresh summer months. 

This is, at least, the heated quasi-lie that I have been feeding my tired mind, pink-slip excusing myself from any form of exercise for the last remaining multi-hours of my summer of freedom.

As a direct drill sergeant result of this past week of excuses, the bike-traveled road was just slightly unfamiliar this temperature morning, an unfamiliarity physically highlighted by the newly-fallen oak tree that blocked my path today at the onset of the neighborhood's entry-way, which had apparently bark-snapped suddenly, unexpectedly during the quiet night hours. 

Revolution

I planted a seed

in that peeling pot

tanning outside my dirty window.

The seed took root and became a drip of hope,

a parachuting raindrop crashing into the sweltering waves.

And then that drip pushed out further and became trickling courage,

a metallic crevice etched and then scrubbed into the dying, porcelain sink.

The trickle then inched skyward and became a stream of fluttering strength,

a wet snippet of steam wafting in and out of those sputtering, condensing vents outside.

And then the stream took in a breath and became a spring of life

a siren song amid the drowning angry torrents of the gods.

And then that spring sprouted and became a flood of freedom,

a battle cry.

And then that flood became a vine and snaked down crumbling bricks,

and my cry was heard.

This tree and I are the same: uprooted unexpectedly, unsure of what is going to happen next, unsure of the path of the cracking sidewalk ahead because our big, leafy ego (the thing that brought us falling down to the crumbling cement in the first place) is blocking our branching line of sight.

Tomorrow there will be no excuses. Tomorrow I will rise early with the twig dew and spread the roots of my bicycle tire treads to the boiling concrete garden of my world. 

And then the cry of my bike chain, clanking against the gears and ligaments on the frame, will be heard throughout my neighborhood of one less tree.

xxv

“I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can be together all the time.”

-Calvin, of ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ fame

            One of the best parts of my summer job is nap-time.

            Between the long hours of three-when-is-this-day-going-to-be-over-o’clock and four-only-two-more-hours-before-I-can-go-home-and-do-nothing-o’clock is the glorious sixty-minute-slot known as “Free Swim.” Since I am not a certified swimming instructor, and definitely not capable of teaching more than the most-basest form of doggy paddle to drooling six-year-olds, I am not legally required to watch the forty-seven screaming children, splashing around in the fitness center’s tepid lap pool. It’s not in my contract. So I sleep in my required green polo, khaki shorts sweatily pressed to my legs.

            The shaded cement is a welcome alternative to the serrated metal benches that my fellow counselors wait out the hour on, ore conducive to the coolness of the sunglassed sleep environment. So armed with only a pink fading kickboard (for stiff back support) and a thigh floatie/pillow (gross, I know), I lay down onto the damp stony mixture of apparently just smooth rocks and Elmer’s Glue, as obscene music blasts in my babapaulus ears, closing my eyes for a solid forty-three minutes.

            These forty-three minutes are sacred, the only way that I survive the day without transforming into a Mr. Hydian crank, forced to roam the lemonade-drenched linoleum floors of the camp room with a cackling snarl. And the other counselors know it. They sit, cradling paperbacks and conversations, quietly letting me be, and let me drift off into dreams of the far-off tomorrow night or the snows of last February or

            I forget. But that isn’t the point.

I have managed to allot myself a little less than an hour of peace, one hour squeezed into my spiral-bound planner between eating and yelling at children, forcing me to think, doze, and figure out life.

            But I have to admit: I miss the water. I haven’t been swimming as much as I should be for a two-bathing-suit-owner in the Texas summer and I’ve been lounging in the shade for far too long, it seems. The sting of chlorine always seems to help my brain synapses function more rapidly, more clearly, shocking my body into a type of submerged meditational, close-eyed semi-coma. Last summer, two summers, years ago I wrote

Wet

Anywhere but the pool, they said.

Don’t get me wrong, the party was just fine,

it was just so loud.

Even the faux stonework tried to get rid of the

squealing gossip and cracking giggles,

throwing it away into a ceaseless, pounding echo.

And that laughter seemed to

      bounce

                                                         bounce

                                bounce

between the walls of my brain.

I just couldn’t stand it anymore.

So with a dive and a thin swallow,

my world became quiet again (like

that last, breathless gasp between the loops of a roller-coaster.)

And so I just stayed there, exhilarated,

water soaking through my half-frayed shoelaces,

soaking through the swirling silence.

Anywhere but the pool, they said.

I don’t get invited to many parties.

            Well I’ve been getting invited to more parties since then, if my past, glasses-wearing self can believe it. But in the spirit of self-discover, tomorrow, I’ve impulsively decided, I’m bringing my swimsuit to work, ready to think and pray and live under the bubbling plastic jets.

            Or maybe not.

            Maybe I’ll just jump into the frothy waves of the lap pool, green polo, sweaty khakis and all, you know, for old time’s sake.