I Wrote A Poem About My Mother

And a Confession of Other Sins

And for what comes next, I’m sorry.

Last week, I emailed my High School English teacher (and one of my favorite writers) after consenting to publish a poem about my mother. I closed my email with the phrase “It’s an odd feeling of both nostalgia and deep love, but I honestly wish I didn’t twist truth into fiction all the time. I think I would be happier.” This was his response.^^

Observations and “The Reality of Experience — Processing, Cataloging, and Stripmining”: A List of Observations from this Past Week

• I walked into an empty office building the other day, on the other side of the State Capitol, on the other side of my campus. I don’t really know why. My rationale is that I wanted a new study spot, but in all honesty I wanted to see adults being adults. To confirm that — of course — it is still possible to be both adult and happy. The office building I choose was 12 stories, with a lovely reception, and — apparently — terrible security. It was also empty. There isn’t really a term adequate enough to describe the eeriness of empty office buildings. Or the emotional afterimage of the bar, in clear daylight, that I stared into on my walk home. Or what it means to be an adult and still be happy. Or how, as I stood in the penthouse conference room, I felt viscerally awareness of the moment turning into a memory.
• The sun-bleached Nirvana poster on his bedroom wall is fastened there by the Poster Putty he asked me for last week. Still, you can witness the attempts made prior. Two corners of the poster are striped of their gloss finish, indicating scotch tape that didn’t hold. The blue ribbon fragments of painters tape folded around the bottom left corner of the poster reveal a similar story. Two carefully poked holes along the top edges have ripped, creating an upside down keyhole shape. He sheepishly explained to me that he had tried to hang it flushed to the wall with fishing line wrapped around the light fixture that is mounted above the poster. That’s when I offered the Poster Putty. I’m examining his handiwork and the poster from his bed while he gets high, lays on the floor, and contemplates dropping out for the fifth time this month. He won’t do it though, because of the poster. Because he’s stubborn enough to hang it up four different ways. Because he doesn’t even really like Nirvana, but appreciates age-appropriate interior design. Because he refused to break the rules and use thumbtacks on rented walls like the rest of us. Because he’s much more driven than what he gives himself credit for. Because he listened to Nirvana’s entire discography in fear that a girl might come over and ask him about a specific track. Because I asked about a song and now he lays on the floor. Because even his weed is dispensary and accurately measured. Because he’s talking to a friend and not an academic advisor, knowing they know he cares about this kind of stuff so much more than he likes to let on.
• Today, my eyelashes, like the window panes, like the door handles, like my ambition, were all frozen. Cold to touch and stuck in place, the chill made everything seem miserable. And look miserable. For when they thawed, my lashes dripped makeup like spilt ink down my face, streaking it dark, staining it all wrong. My hair took on the texture of aluminum foil, crunchy and bendable. My lips split to reveal blood, darkly coating only the left side of my mouth. It was a look. I was avant-garde. Still, for a moment, I saw the world with crystallized lashes. Snow framing my face, my hair, making the sunlight look soft and blurring the edge of my vision pink. For a moment, my cheeks flushed and the loss of sensation in my face felt comfortable. For a moment, beauty was captured in the cold, making me question if thawing it — warmth, comfort — is the true cause of misery, ruining it.
• Nervous for a midterm presentation in the class following this one, my friend’s left leg jitters, knocking my desk and causing my pens to cascade towards the floor. In the midst of his profuse apologies and ill-attempts at aid, he somehow manages to drop his wallet, allowing me to witness the 2-by-3-print-out of his girlfriend he keeps in the clear pocket covering his debit cards. I didn’t know people our age did that anymore. Print pictures for their wallets. I don’t even think I own a wallet. Regardless, as my friend bent down to retrieve our mixed belongings, his face softened upon seeing the picture. His leg stopped shaking. I wish I could tell her that, the girl in the picture. And I wish I could thank my friend without it sounding weird. For both reminding me to purchase a wallet, and for the vicarious comfort his adoration for her brought me.
• I stopped breathing at a coffee shop today. It was odd, because I’ve never really done that before. I’ve been told the feeling is like getting punched in the chest, air knocked out of your lungs, gasping for air, crying, panicking when it isn’t there, loosing all and any control. I anticipated alarm. But it wasn’t there. Instead, it felt like standing at the edge of a pool, holding your breath, preparing to drive in, then sinking to the bottom, releasing air slowly, feeling it burn as you inhale chlorine. Allowing the panic to wash over you gently whilst ignoring the terror. I’m been swimming my whole life. I know how to breathe: how to hold, count, and control it. But when I lost my breath at a coffee shop today it was, in a way, merciful. My vision blurred, my hearing vanished, my body stopped shaking, I noticed I wasn’t counting. I was done swimming. And it was so much easier than I thought it would be. But the shock of cold water, breaking surface tension, is enough to recall anyone back to life. So when the voice of the barista calling out some order managed to reach me, I noticed the way the ice in the windowpanes glittered. And without thinking, I started kicking, moving, swimming, breathing all over again.
• My friend, she’s five-foot-two. She’s got eyes wider than headlights, blinking up at you. And each night, she tilts her head back, to search for the moon. What a view. What a view.
• A reverbed version of “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities is playing when we decide to stand on the table and dance. But we’re not really dancing. Nobody is. But that’s okay, because we’re the right level of drunk where standing on elevated surfaces seems like the best idea and not something we sometimes call other girls desperate for doing. Besides, it’s not even desperate — let them live. When again, past twenty-five, will you get to stand on a table, scream, and be rewarded for it? As we move on the table, I remember how I suggested we take a one credit ballroom dance class as a group next semester. Because when again, past twenty-five, will you get to take sorta-free ballroom dance classes when it’s not really your passion or hobby? Or have the time to do so? That idea was understandably met with a lesser level of enthusiasm than the table, but the logic behind it is why I’m absolutely loving being on this table in the first place. Because we’re not even twenty yet. Because we’re all together on a table or at the library or at the zoo or in class or sneaking into bars or doing any and all of the sorts of things I work desperately to write about. And I’m writing to hold it all together before we forget it, before it all goes away, and before we’re twenty- five, living in different cities with different people. I’m writing so fast that I’m even writing here, on the table, in my mind. Writing with focus, trying to capture the moment, not realizing the table legs have snapped and how one of us is throwing up in the bathroom. Not noticing the guy who asked me if I wanted a drink or when he whisks away someone else. Not accepting that while I’m not twenty, my friends are twenty, twenty-one, present in their moving realities, not trying to do and save it all — slow and reverbed.

Isolation — “Pinched in the holiness of the moment”

So, there’s this “fake word” floating around on the internet: Kairosclerosis. What I adore about fake words that people pull together sounds to form an emotional vernacular. Putting together both phonetics from other languages and imagination to create words to describe feelings you never seem to have the vocabulary for. “Kairosclerosis. n . the moment you realize that you’re currently happy — consciously trying to savor the feeling — which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, causing it to slowly dissolve into an aftertaste.”

In high school, one of my favorite novels was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. There isn’t really a plot to this book, it’s a Künstlerroman that follows a protagonist: Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter ego/antihero as he moves from the early stages of childhood towards adulthood. Both Joyce and Stephen grow up in Ireland and cannot help but observe the world in a way that hinders them from truly engaging with it. It’s terrifyingly lonely. The majority of the book observes Stephen as he tries and fails to balance his artistic ambition with the realities, relationships, and duties around him. He feels disjointed, simultaneously isolated and tied down in rooms full of new people.

With time, both author and protagonist recognize that while they cannot engage with the world, they can write about it. Capturing reality due to their internalized sense of “removal” provides them with nuanced artistic objectivity. Sure, they can never truly live in the moment or turn off their perception, but there is solace in art. And through Stephen, Joyce demonstrates that there is duty to creating “good” art too. In the end, Joyce and Stephen choose duty, seeking exile. Fully committing to writing about life rather than being trapped by the constraints that come with living it, Stephen distances himself from Ireland in order to write about it better.

The book ends with a euphoric stream of consciousness. Stephen doesn’t view his exile as limiting. Instead, he finds freedom in the restraint. He feels fulfillment in choosing to be an artist, as someone who observes rather than having to juggle the role of both person and producer. It’s scary to think how much I related to story whose protagonist I found to be abhorrently selfish most of the time. Still, I think I adored the book because of that closing, Stephen got his happy ending.

“When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” — Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

However, unlike Stephen, I really don’t want to live in exile. I can’t. It’s not human. I want to be here, alive, in the moment. I pray to shut off intellect and not think so hard about everything all of the time. To observe less and live more. To be thoughtless from time to time. To not always feel profoundly “alone” in crowded rooms. I think someone like Stephen might shame me for those desires, for selfishly wishing — wasting — away perception. With a last name like Dedalus, he is sure to choose ambition and artistry over settling for the comforts of reality. And despite all my elegies towards “really living,” I seem to do it too.

For Stephen, me, ambition directly contradicts desire, producing a state of internal turmoil. A happy ending, it seems, is picking one or the other and sticking to it. Stephen picked. And I’m confessing now that I’m torn between pride and sloth. That I am consciously aware of what to do, but when I say I “simply cannot” it means a part of me chooses not to. Pride takes hold. For this indecision, I suffer consequences, feel longing. And it’s all of my own making.

“One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” ― James Joyce, Dubliners.

Longing — Thoughtless…Mindful…Soulless”

Nothingness is but the absence of everything. And vise versa. Humans cannot really comprehend concepts of nothingness or everything, there’s always just — something. All of the time. While filtering in the “something,” we can chose to discard it as “a nothing” or treat it like it’s everything. Spam mail or favorite memories. We have the power to control how we perceive and deal with our “somethings,” with our reality. Writing is longing for everything, fearing the nothing, and trying to capture a something.

I’m longing for something, and I don’t know what it is yet. I want to be an artist, a teacher, a mother, a lover, a free thinker, a loner, a critic, a composer. I want to live in the city and in the country and in van that drives through both. I want an epic romance and an equally fulfilling independent career. I want to major in every subject, take every class. I want time to watch every classic movie while also keeping up with all the new ones — the same goes for books. I want someone else to sit besides me at the kitchen table. I want hands to pull me back to bed, longing for “just five more minutes” each morning. I want to lead a thousand lives, to live and die wholeheartedly for each cause instead of having to balancing it all at once. I want exile — nothing. I need everything. I long for it all.

That’s never how life was intended to work. You have to learn to choose, to be content in your choices. For right now, I’m choosing to try everything for as long as I can — and to write about it it all. Not in exile, but as an immersive experience — exchanging objectivity for care. I want to hold close the writings of what I leave behind when I finally learn to make a choice.

Last January, I chose to move out of my hometown. To go to college out of state. To put my interests first, to get a chance to observe and experience in a new place with more opportunity. This Summer, I’m choosing to go to the East Coast. And as exciting as it all may be, it feels a little bit like exile. I’m doing everything I’ve ever wanted and cannot help longing for what I left behind.

So, I’m writing. I seem to only ever write about home these days. True poetry, not just observations. As I explore more and figure it all out, it’s easy to write about what I know, what I miss, and what I’m so sure I love.

I wrote a poem about my mother. I should have sent it to her.

the vibe for right now:

Where I wrote this: