not quite what I expected

(There’s a reason Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted is my favorite novel)

I could laugh. The morning of senior year. I dyed my hair a color I feel shy about, I broke up with my boyfriend not even two days ago. My clothes overtake my clean room in rumpled heaps that mirror how my insides feel. Good, clean, but rumpled.

A log:

The kitchen? A mess.

The main room? Backpacks and green cowl sweaters and dark furred coats tossed over every spare couch, fat armchair. On our table sits half melted candles, a sketchbook, two laptops, a used GOPUFF bag from when I ordered kombucha and lemonade last night, a used lighter, weed, a bottle cap, Nathan’s keys, an emptied wine glass with red still rimming the bottom like a skim of paint.

I woke up in the cool gray of Taylor and my room this morning and it all came back to me—the events of the last few days—in a slow flash. I looked up. I felt neither tired nor rested. Perhaps that’s not true. Perhaps I felt more tired than I thought, especially once I saw my eyes in the mirror, red as if I had been crying. (I had been crying, of course, went to bed and felt tears pooling under my lids and slipping down my face, so it’s a wonder I didn’t wake up with salt streaks).

Now what to do with all the letters?

That’s another question.

I came home from work yesterday after getting beer with two coworkers, Mattias and Itai, and walked into the main room to see Nathan sweeping. Look, they said, and pointed at the table. A small pumpkin and a squash meant for eating sat beside a horde of candles, tea lights in two green beveled glasses, red eucharist candles in short glass vases, a tall and proud red candle atop a Victorian era holder. I thought you’d love it, they said.

I still don’t know how to do this.

It all comes back to you.

Right now, it feels like a day is a week, a week is a month, a month is a year, and a year is

a couple of days

I suppose

(but I won’t go there)

Last night, Taylor made a rice bowl for me while I cried and sorted out my words. For the sake of time, I will not explain everything, only to say that someone I care about a lot, I hurt a great deal, because I rushed into something by trusting my emotional intimacy in a moment. I crossed my fingers and my luck wasn’t enough. Taylor brought ice to me and made me open my palms to hold the cubes when I started hyperventilating. Here, she said. I can’t, I said.

We drove to the store and purchased plums and pomegranates and kombucha and pie and kale and miscellaneous other items that were mostly unnecessary but felt crucial in the moment, and we eschewed bags and carried out our groceries and snacks in the crooks of our arms, stacking ice-cream containers with la croix cans, and I slipped the two small plums—so sweet and flush against my fingers that you could smell their wooden velvet taste—into my pockets. Nathan played a song they loved and Taylor and Nathan danced with their shoulders in the car. Stopped at a red light, the red illuminating the curves of their faces.

I ate my pie on the way home without a spoon and remembered last year at this time, how it was always pie, pie with Hislop and pie with Lennox and pie with Taylor during and after work at the law firm, when we would venture to PCC to scrounge up a cheaper lunch that always skipped the scale past too expensive because of a hardboiled egg in our salad, the accumulation of fruit, except for that one season last year or perhaps at the beginning of this one when we bought cinnamon rolls instead and split them at a frequency that seemed daily. How one day, I walked home—wearing all black, I think—the wind a current against my face, and I carried a cinnamon roll in a paper bag and drank coffee from PCC and listened to LADYTALK on MTV, the episode with Durga Chew-Bose. I felt as I should, which is to say, I felt right. There was something romantic about pulling pieces of a slightly dried cinnamon roll off with my fingers and eating it in haphazard bites halfway between home and not. Or, the afternoon I studied in the library, writing a paper that I wasn’t prepared for, and Taylor came to the bottom level of the library from work and Fremont with a cinnamon roll, a cup of coffee, advil. We took a photo in the bathroom and a little video that was part of my one second for that year. She had the newspaper, that was when she started doing the crosswords, and she wasn’t good at it yet, whole rows left untouched and her writing in pencil. Now she does the crosswords in pen and finishes them. Erin did crosswords in pen.

I’ve had gluten free and vegan pie from Flying Apron twice in the last week. Erin and I had pie there once, and she shared it with me, bites of her raspberry frosting, though I was greedy and though she bought it because she knew I wanted it. She did things like that, paid attention and then acted in a way to accommodate what the people around her wanted. We took advantage of that more than I wish I had to admit. Yet she still loved us. She would be in Iceland right now. Halló Hannah, she would say. Hvað er að frétta af þér? We’d have a postcard on our fridge with a photograph of the hot springs on the front in blue tones. Or, an odd animal posing in the midst of a salt flat that Erin found humorous. Look at this stupid horse, I hear her saying, it’s sooo dumb. Then a giggle. You’re so dumb. Which for Erin meant, I love you, and take care, and both expressions were synonymous expressions of intimacy, spoken under the duress of sarcasm. Last year at this time, we studied Literary Theory together and spent afternoons parsing through Barthes and Saussure and trying to make sense of structuralism. That lunch Erin and Zack and I had. Grease stains on the table, our elbows leaning on the edge, foregoing homework to make waissail in Erin’s kitchen. That one day we got coffee and Erin was sad and had to leave, and I stayed behind, but when we sat in the window, the light made shadows across our table in cut glass rims and fractals. And Dr. Chaney brought candles, rosemary bread, clementines that fit in our palms, to class three days after Erin died.

Erin would be in Iceland right now. We near the anniversary of her death and I skirt allusions to last year.

And a year is a couple of days.

Or perhaps a year is a life.

At the table last night, Nathan and Taylor and I sat in our respective chairs. Nathan started giggling, it’s so funny, we’re sitting around looking at each other. Taylor and I exchanged glances. It’s nice though, she said. My face felt too heavy to smile. I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and watched the warm light from the candles fill all our faces. We are here.

The remnants of last night linger though Taylor and Nathan still sleep. How sweet it is to see the strains of one life intersecting with another, and another. A pomegranate in the kitchen that I bought because of my dad, Nathan’s sketches, the mug Taylor bought from Justin who did her and Lennox and my tattoos last year August, when I was blonde and uncertain. Now I’m dark-haired and no more certain, but I am more. There must be something in that sentiment.

Dvorak on Taylor’s record player, Dvorak that mom played on the piano or we listened to on NPR. Cool gloss table. Always autumn. When we first moved into this apartment, over two years ago, we had the small black table as our only centerpiece, and we had a tray of candles against the darkness. In the morning, the light sliced into the room and slants of white sun fell against the fat pumpkin we kept until it got soft, and even then, we let the pumpkin sit on the porch too long until it furred with a mint mold and left a circle of black on the outside deck. That was two years ago. Lennox was here. Lennox would be the one to drive us to PCC, now it is Nathan. We still sing in the car.

Let’s make breakfast tomorrow, Nathan said. Yes, we agreed.

I woke up without an alarm and knew in the coolness of morning that it would be a good time to write. And so I washed my face and made coffee—the crappy Trader Joes coffee that Lennox had me try her freshman year in the dorms, and that I drank almost every morning before I started working at the lawfirm and drank the oily coffee from the breakroom or splurged on Milstead, and that I started buying again only I left my coffee in the Image office though I brought everything else home and said my goodbyes in a night dark and reminiscent of Richard Rodriguez’s reading when I carried long stemmed tulips home in a tall rounded glass vase. They bumped the ceiling of Emily’s car, as she drove Anthony and I home. Hannah, don’t give your whole life to Image, Paul had said when I offered to leave my mints at the office. And the other night, Paul and I talking over cocktails and candlelight in Essex, we weren’t friends then, though! And, you’re right. How the then that was my life became a then, and how it is now something we refer back to. How so much changes.

The ordinary instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it.

I didn’t read as much of Didion as I was supposed to this summer, so I am going to attempt to finish her before the end of October, which I think is reasonable. I will communicate to Reinsma and Chaney that I busied myself with other things, equally as important, and communicate that I will read. I see her tomorrow, and I’m wearing my Jane pants, or my Katherine Hepburn pants. (If only my hair was lighter!)

So I washed my face and turned on hot water for coffee and lit candles, because I had the image of myself sitting, perhaps on the deck though I ended up on the table, writing, with coffee and music playing. Curled up, contemplative. Even though the kitchen is messy. It is as it should be. My discover weekly playlist started off reminiscent of mornings from the past three years. I pulled a mug from the cabinet—after deliberating too long on which to use to mark my last first morning of school—and realized that three years ago, I was preparing for my first day of college. I tried to remember what I wore. Couldn’t. Probably leggings and a scarf. How glad I am I am not in that time.

(WE OUT HERE, my mug says, from Justin. A cactus, a few UFO’s, and a stick-figure person being transported up to the ship in black ink on the tall white enamel. Is it enamel? I’m not sure. For some reason, I just thought of mom, at Pier 1, and how she loved candles too, and lemon smells, and brought home sleek and glossy furniture that couldn’t last.)

Before I started writing, the threads of thought I attempted to grasp by making some sort of ritual, or at least making some sort of event out of this morning—which is perhaps what I want, all the time, for my moments to be marked by something that indicates it is part of a larger scheme, a greater narrative, and damn it, Paul, you were correct, but so was Didion and so is Didion, how about that? Anyways. How nothing is perfect, yet everything is right. Not everything is correct, but everything is good. Curiously, that everything does not negate all the terror that is awful—the fact that we have a white supremacist in the office, concurrent and increasing global disasters, how we may be losing all our healthcare, and so forth—yet it does call attention to the ways we build our lives out of the remains of tragedies, both small and large. Erin would be in Iceland. My grandpa is dying. I broke up with two boys, and not both were my choice. Taylor fell on her bike and fucked up her face. You sit down to dinner.

But I sit here, with my Trader Joes coffee, music playing on Nathan’s speaker, three candles still warm pockets in the rapidly lightening room, and in a few minutes, Nathan and Taylor and I will make breakfast, and we will make an event of the first day of class, though nothing is perfect, and the kitchen is a mess, and I’m not ready, and Nathan went to a wedding that hurt them and Taylor’s trying to deal with her family, and we’re not ready, none of us, and perhaps that’s it.

I realized that we’re never ready for anything in our life, ever.

Yep. Ready assent.

We just do it—and then we’re ready because we did.

Perhaps that’s how we make a life and what it means. All the threads and interweavings of the ways we chose readiness and hurled ourselves into decisions and retained a sense of our selves that carried us—pomegranate on the kitchen, Taylor’s vintage books, the candles—and we make breakfast in the morning with potatoes and eggs and kale and burn the candles to stubs (this green one already has a trail of warm wax in two strands down the side) and I know we will sing, and I know we will dance in the living room, and I know we will send each other off with I love you!

Who knows where we will be a year from now.

WE OUT HERE—and of course it’s slapdash and of course dishes clatter in piles in the sink, and of course I made a hasty decision and of course Taylor scuffed her face and of course we stayed up too late and spent excess on snacks and didn’t do anything we were supposed to do, but we sat at the table by each other. That’s what we’re supposed to do more than anything.

So! Senior year. I woke up and thought, here it goes. Here is the cusp, the precipice, the runway. After this, everything redoubles, movement goes from slow motion, and we watch the mirage of our lives like catching glimpses of ourselves in passing bus windows. Here, not here. A steady accumulation of time. Look at the way / everything fades, Chaz Bundick Meets the Mattson 2 sings in their song, Star Stuff. I can’t help but think of my hair. Everything fades. I know that as sure as I know we’ll run out of candles before October. And so it goes. Oh it haunts me / Tell me it haunts you, too, Mt. Joy sings in Sheep.

All these threads, how it could have been, was, might have, we thought—but no should's—and all this haunting. All my life for this damn haunting. How fitting it's nearly October. Nathan just ran in and hugged me. Senior year, they cried. Are you ready?

No, I suppose not. But that's alright, that's as it should be.

here we go again

I (of course, to begin with an I) had the best chai today. Top ten, surely. Can't remember the other nine, but this one must be up there.

Walked outside wearing my George Costanza coat (one of the two) and a beanie on my head, olive colored scarf around my neck. Shivered from the wind. The sky itself like a lousing chicken, grayed from rain and dampness. Tried to read Didion, couldn't think. Came home and cried about my the pain in my body, then chopped vegetables for a few hours and stirred quinoa into vegetable broth. Who knew the pleasure of well baked broccoli?

(not I, said the fly)

(not me, said the flea)

Anyhow. Nathan’s eating chips in the kitchen. The rain outside already muffles cars as they zip past our new road. We have a new road! I didn’t think we needed one, Taylor said. She flung her arm out, but look at it! The new concrete looks like you unrolled a rug of the sky at precisely 2:48 AM.

My knees hurt. My boyfriend is asleep in Chicago. Sleepless in Seattle, huh? (made the joke. No self editing here.)

I suppose I’m trying to write again.

I suppose I’m trying to figure it all out, but without pretense. Always without pretense. Always with particularity.

The sky, it suddenly seems important to tell you, the sky is pink as a shell.

How to end these things? I’ve forgotten.