Washington

The landscape is always different. Like now, sitting in the backseat of a hot car, listening to the professional and the woman who knows him best rattle off diagnoses and issues, hopes for the future and problems from the past. The grass is taller and the sky is bluer and the hills in the distance are nothing like back home, pine trees, most of them young, stretching and stabbing the clear sky with their pointed tops.


Just like Montana, seven years ago, driving across the deserted land with the immense mountains in the distance going to see the boy I grew up with, the other brother who built me forts and taught me how to play sega, but who I didn't know at all, who I was terrified to see because the last memories I had of him were marred with tears and confusion and behaviors that a little girl like me could not possibly understand.


And now it's nothing I haven't heard before, and things that I will surely hear again--executive functioning issues and substance abuse relapses and disappointments and the general unhappiness or inability to survive in a world that he feels doesn't want him--so I drown it out and stare at the passing landscape trying to ignore the anxiety in my stomach at the thought of seeing the one person in this world that I absolutely cannot live with but I also cannot live without.


Last night mommy was screaming in her sleep. When I finally woke her up, I asked her what she was dreaming about. She said she had a dream he was using again. I said it was only a dream.

Transition Reflections

College gives you the luxury of having the ability to socialize for virtually every single hour of the day and night for nine months straight. There is always somebody awake. Always somebody around, whether it be your best friend across the room or your neighbors down the hall. That's something you definitely miss at home. The ability to talk to someone, borrow something, or go somewhere without having to take more than ten steps from your bedroom door at any hour of the day. Amidst the chaos of college life it is so easy to take for granted that transcendental feeling of knowing that a friend is only a step away. You are so often overwhelmed and overstimulated at college that, sometimes, you would do anything for an empty room and a quiet night. But, once you are home, and your parents are at work and your friends are a car ride away, you realize how lucky you are that for eighty percent of the entire year you have the ability to walk across the hallway, into the arms and actual homes, of your best friends.

A Stranger In A Borrowed Bed

The anxiety didn’t set in right away

It’s funny how anxiety works like that

It gives you a few hours until it begins to seep down into the core of that impossible-to-point-out cavity somewhere between your rib cage and stomach

To seep down and melt into your insides like syrup over a waffle

It was easy moving everything out today

You just peel the pictures off the walls and put your clothes in a duffel bag and untangle the strings of extension cords that gave life to your computer and kissed your phone charger and made your flat iron burn all year long

It’s a lot to drag the boxes down the hallway and into your mom’s mini-van that she used to drive you around in back home

But you do it anyways, and then it’s over and then you go out to dinner with your parents and they go home while you head back to the library to study more

I packed up my life today

And since I’m not leaving until finals are over the only thing that I was worried about this morning was the un-comfort of sleeping without a mattress pad for more than 24 hours

Like I said, it takes a few hours for the maple syrup to liquefy

It wasn’t until I got into bed tonight

And the whole room looked back at me from a different angle because my bed risers are gone that I started to sense that impossible-to-point-out pit below my chest melt

It wasn’t until I reached over to turn on my white glass lamp because it was too dark, that I really felt the change

And when I looked up at the same exact wall I have slept next to for the past seven months and saw an empty white space gawking at me where a colorful, poster-filled and picture-hung panorama used to hang I wanted to call my parents and have them bring back my Andy Warhol posters and my silver mirror and my Kodak pictures

I don’t feel like it’s my room anymore

And I guess that is because it is not

Next year it will go to a baby sophomore

And then it will go to another one the year after that

Just like it was somebody else’s before it was mine

Right now I feel like a stranger sleeping in a borrowed bed

-Monday, June 3, 2012 2:47 am


I suppose there is no better place for my poetry debut than this very blog. Tonight I couldn't fall asleep, and when I suddenly realized why this is what I came up with. Hopefully, in the future there will be more poetry to come.