Every quarter, while I fill the pages front to back with notes for class, I fill the pages back to front with lists and dreams and thoughts. Often, these things creep into my margins and fill up the pages that are supposed to be notes, too.
Anyway, here is a little collection of notebook fragments that I've pulled from the insanely disorganized doodles of this quarter:
I.
All I can remember is making lewd jokes in my sleep. Now,
dreamless, I feel hollow and heavy. Interrupted at least once, often twice in a
night, crawling awake into gray-blue to empty myself out. Distracted sleeping.
II,
Only 3 days ago I complained into these pages, uncomfortable
in my own skin, feeling stranded in the sea of my mistakes. But today, despite
an early morning headache, and toast burned beyond rescue, I feel alert and
ready, full of creative energy and hopefulness. Impervious to inattention,
content with my social shortcomings, full of forward momentum. I hope it lasts.
III.
I dreamed that someone put me in a play without telling me
the lines. It was Shakespeare. I tried to make a joke, but the audience was
stunned and horrified by my irreverence.
Later, in a cafeteria, some precocious girl kept saying,
“You know?” And I didn’t know. She asked me to make eggs fifteen different
ways.
IV.
Somehow, I returned to Spain to learn more Spanish, but
everyone spoke to me in patient English. Everyone I knew was one unwieldy hour
away. I wanted to see those smiling faces in Granada, so close but impossible.
Kim was in a messy room with grayish light, where a boy was
sweating feverishly into his sheets. I could see his bare shoulders. Maybe the
fever was love; she would not leave him.
V.
The seams in my body are aching. I woke up unhinged from
time, all gray and bleary eyed. It’s my own fault for going to bed thirsty.
What is the name of my ignoring divinity, white eyed with rage foam; where is
my crystalline sense of interconnectivity and direction? I am susceptible to
pt. 10 Times New Roman, I feel heavy with second hand almost grief and undone
elastic, with the orange wind that rattles my slumberous senses. I am
susceptible to unintentional eye contact; I am semi-perpetually slogging
through the fog of my fade-away analysis.
VI.
There are golden leaves bursting up beneath my eyes, there
is a ghost, feeling my body. There is a thirty percent chance of rain, one
hundred percent change of my pants slipping down. In the creeping, hopeful heat
of Tuesday morning, I am bursting with sadness for humanity, bursting with
melancholy affection for all the tiny, glaring vulnerabilities. The tall boy by
the door, standing so awkwardly in his big blue high tops; the lecturer’s
self-conscious clichés; a red-head’s soft shoulders; the smell of cheap public
bathroom soap on so many hands; a girl’s chunky leather shoes, peeking out of
her wide jeans, her chubby face full of lisping urgency. My mind is so critical
and loathsome, so full of sad love.
VII.
If Rosa Morales were teaching Me in her bleating accent, what would she say?
“It was a known fact that she was awkward, and often red.
She burrowed in a smoky, striped jacket, and withdrew. She planned anti
climactic social events and then dreaded them. She offered squirming
hospitality, begrudging kindness. She lived according to inconsistent belief
systems and jumbled dreaming. She lusted after more authentic poverty and
groaned at her tedious transformation into a penniless poet. Who is certain
of their greatness and does it make the heavy scales of success any lighter? she would wonder. She did not know what she wanted
very often. She was self-centered and sighing. She worried she was not very
smart, after all. She could the smell ink on her cluttered pages, and the sides
of her hands.”
VIII.
You and me, in blue-black predawn, your hand squeezes my
side just a tiny bit. You’re drifting off, holding on. We ate orange capsules
of focus, and hummed, and hummed in place, sitting on that faded futon, hours
jangling through our desperate nerves. I become weird and obsessive, you lost
steam, we distracted and muttered, went off on tangents. You spent what felt
like at least an hour trying to explain integrating or something called u and a
bunch of garbage symbols, but I leaned against you a little bit, and felt your
hair brush mine where our heads met, and none of the words you said made sense
but I said, uh huh, and was content, pretending this was maybe the third time
we hung out, and that all our tiny touching was flirtatious and thrilling. It
was easy to pretend, because the wanting to touch you has never changed.
