it's raining tonight
and my hair is thinning
and your dad is dying
and tomorrow i'll fall in love
or try, anyway,
and i miss dublin
and the lights on the bridge
and the day it snowed in march
and we built snowmen on campus
and i thought maybe i had found the truth.
come home with me,
see the places i'm from and the places i'm not,
and the mountains that raised me without knowing
and eat my food
and drink my beer
and sweet talk my parents
and don't stay, because i won't, but maybe just visit for awhile.
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you died in the summer. how do you understand that? there are ways that make sense, a car crash, a cliff dive, a wildfire, a spark, a flame, a blaze. a blaze of glory. knowing you'll die and doing it anyway because it's beautiful. but that's not what you did, is it?
i don't understand that. how you can look at the sky in the summertime and still want to die. the sun doesn't set. literally, the sun does not set. the summer i was eighteen i went on midnight bike rides, two a.m. bike rides, four a.m. bike rides. didn't you want to go bike riding more than you wanted to die? i do. i do, i do.
been thinking lately about how i tried so hard to leave alaska and alaska will not leave me. i wanted to leave since i knew leaving was an option, since i understood outside to be a place i could go. not just on vacation, not just rick steves red suitcase, mom's favorite travel tv man, not just to paris for a few weeks to drown in the smell of subway piss and since-burned cathedrals. since i understood that i could leave forever.
but of course, i can't leave. or rather, i cannot be left. during orientation week, they asked what home meant to each of us and i said the smell of tundra. how do you explain the smell of tundra, the feeling of it? the way you sink in and spring back and your legs burn with the effort, and clouds of spicy-sweet berry scent come pouring up from the lichens that contain no berries at all because i would never step on a blueberry plant? the rabbit on my chest is not a rabbit. it's a snowshoe hare.
i cannot take my home out of me. i wonder why i ever wanted to. once i was more afraid of returning than anything. i knew people who left only to come back, finding the rest of the world lacking compared to our home. i was terrified of being one of them. i hated it there. nothing ever happens, nobody lives here, it's just trees and more trees until you swim into the arctic ocean. and now, god, now, i find the happening exhausting, the people impenetrable, and god, i miss the trees. i miss the trees.
a photo of you at seventeen, in a field, on a mountain, standing on a table in a classroom. dressed in flannel and jeans or dress shirts and leather or fleece and hiking boots—there are lots of photos of you at seventeen. you've never been so happy in your stupid, privileged life. a girl breaks your heart and you write poetry about it like it's beautiful, like the way she does it won't haunt you. you break a girl's heart and care even less about that. you're smiling in the photos. your skin breaks out and it's a celebration. your voice breaks and your sadness along with it, cracking open and rebirthing, falling upwards against the sun.
contrast:
a photo of you at twenty, in a gym bathroom, in an elevator, on the floor of your college dorm, dressed in t-shirts and shorts, always t-shirts and shorts, failing to stave off the new york heat. always moving, always busy. the elevator takes you to class, the gym takes your body where you've always been desperate for it to go, the dorm is only a temporary arrangement. you break a girl's heart and get mad when she tries to heal from it. somewhere along the way you've lost the ability to get your own heart broken. you eat dinner with your new friends and hate it. the food, the company. you don't call your old friends anymore—what would you say? you're not sad. most of the time you're happy, even. you're just not seventeen.
and here we are. the countdown on my phone says eighty-nine days until graduation. tomorrow it will read eighty-eight. then eighty-seven. then it will be may, and i’ll be walking across a stage in a stupid hat, looking out at a sea of people who i mostly don’t know at all, and i will want to stay.
i have always refused to be afraid of change, and that won’t end now. i will not be afraid of the summer, or of moving across the country in august. i will take every single thing the world gives to me in the coming years, and i will ask for more.
but some part of me will stay seventeen. some part of me will stay sitting on the floor of someone else’s bedroom, sharing thai food out of a takeout container and playing guitar, one friend painting beside me, using an old magazine as a palette. some part of me will stay in that overheated, overcrowded box, as we looked at each other and realized that we had less than a year left of this, that in ten months we’d all be drifting away on the wind, to different schools, different countries, different lives. some part of me will dig his fingers into the carpet and live forever in the halcyon auburn, live forever in that bedroom, in the spaces between fingers, in the silence between chords.
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i am sitting in my red truck in the parking lot of my old high school. there is a girl in the passenger seat, and at this moment, i think i am in love with her. in a week or two, i will realize that she just likes the same music as me and has recently adopted a puppy. it’s a mistake anyone could make, really.
we are listening to a sad song. i know this one well, because it’s my phone that’s connected to my truck’s speakers. the girl beside me is playing dj, queuing up music from my spotify library. she is the only other person i have ever told my phone password. another piece of evidence that i’m falling in love—or perhaps, evidence that i no longer have anything to hide. secrets are for children, and i am not a child anymore.
i am sitting in my red truck in the parking lot of my old high school. there is a girl in the passenger seat, and at this moment, i think i am in love with her. in a week or two, i will realize that she just likes the same music as me and has recently adopted a puppy. it’s a mistake anyone could make, really.
we are listening to a sad song. i know this one well, because it’s my phone that’s connected to my truck’s speakers. the girl beside me is playing dj, queuing up music from my spotify library. she is the only other person i have ever told my phone password. another piece of evidence that i’m falling in love—or perhaps, evidence that i no longer have anything to hide. secrets are for children, and i am not a child anymore.
we stare down the front doors of the school. i am fourteen, walking through those doors for the first time. it is not my school yet. it won’t be until august. in the lobby at freshman night, i make eye contact with the person behind the gsa table. they smile at me, and at fourteen, i am too afraid to talk to them. i think that they are beautiful. i will love them next year, for the entire time that i am fifteen.
i don’t drive them around in my red truck. we are friends when i still drive the old one, the truck with mismatched seatbelts and a broken radio and a plastic tarp where the back window should be. i always feel like an invader, driving through their neighborhood. my truck’s engine strains against the hills as i thread my way between mcmansions with faux-greek pillars by their doors. their mother is a doctor, and i never quite feel like i measure up. i pray they don’t judge me from the passenger seat, and of course they never would, but i am sixteen and have only recently fallen out of love with them, so i care desperately what they think of me. i still do.
i drive my red truck through the teacher’s parking lot behind the high school. i am eighteen and it has been seven months since the person from the gsa table and i last spoke. the girl beside me is playing happy music now, having discovered the only upbeat playlist in my library. maybe i believe i am in love with her because she can sing. and she does sing, loud and happy in the passenger seat, as if i am not there.
i am not there. i am standing at the back door of the school, pretending the cold doesn’t bother me. i am dragging bag after bag of paper recycling out the door and throwing it into the back of my friend’s truck. there is still snow on the ground, and my hands stick to the metal school door. it is march sixth, and i do not know it yet, but it is my last day of high school.
my friend drives us across town in her truck. there are five people, two dogs, and several hundred pounds of recycling fitted into a truck made to comfortably seat two. one of the other human passengers cannot find her seatbelt. it is a miracle we don’t die.
we unload the paper at a recycling facility in the warehouse district. i will appear in the volunteer recycling program section of the national honor society page of the yearbook. i was never in honor society. i am there as a favor, and because i do not want to say goodbye yet. in my picture, i am laughing, tearing an old math textbook in two with my hands. i am pictured surrounded by my friends. it is a good last day.
i pull my red truck out of the parking lot and onto the highway. maybe i think i am in love with the girl beside me because i do not know how else to remember this moment. i do not know how to remember any moment. where do i put these memories, now that they’re over? where do days go once i’ve lived them? where do they go that i cannot get them back?
i cannot make these moments mean something. there will never be a reason for me to tell anyone about the people i once loved and the places i once touched. where can i keep the memories that don’t matter?
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i can hear the bath running in the next room. i can hear your voice, all of your voices, talking quietly, laughing, remembering the night we’ve just finished having. i’m lying in bed, and there’s still light coming through the window—it stays light out so late these days. summer is climbing out of the mountains and spreading out across the land.
i guess it’s been a year since that night now, and i’m still working up the courage to stay where i am. when you came back from the next room, i was already gone.
“not so hard,” i say. the sound hurts my ears: glass on metal, glass falling onto glass. it’s so loud it feels like you’re breaking them across my face. it’s hotter than hell, early august in an empty parking lot at midday, because you felt like breaking something and i didn’t want to volunteer for another round in the backyard. you never learned how to pull your punches, and i still have bruises from last week.
they’re my fault, mostly, for saying yes when you wanted to fight. we don’t wear gloves, you and me; that takes the whole point out of it. skin on skin, the only way we know how. boys will be boys, your dad says, and leaves ice packs in the freezer for when we’re done.
i don’t know how to ask you for a hug. i don’t know how to tell you i want to touch you gently sometimes, take naps together, put my arm around your shoulders, hold your hand, hug you when i leave, feel the warmth of our bodies in the sun without bleeding for it. but even if i knew how to ask, what would you say? when was the last time you held someone who wasn’t your mother?
hell, when was the last time you held her?
"give me another,” you say. you don’t even look at me, you just wipe the sweat from your face with your t-shirt. i flinch as the next bottle shatters, even though i'm the one who handed it over. what can i say? i keep hoping that the next time i hand you a weapon, our fingers will touch.
the streets are the same, but the buildings are all different. i don’t know if my eyes have changed, or the world has, moving on and on and on without me.
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i’ve been thinking about that since this morning, when i got on twitter and saw that the last message had been sent with no reply. i remembered it, over and over, whenever i turned my phone on or looked out the window.
my battery is low and it’s getting dark, she said, before the winds of another planet drowned her out. it upset me. strange, maybe, certainly irrational, that i teared up every few hours thinking about a lump of metal on another planet, so far away that i can’t comprehend the distance, that i have no way to imagine or measure it. i’ve never spent much time before thinking about our tiny inventions, infinities away, rolling and moving and speaking back to us. i’ve only thought of her now that she’s done answering. but she’s a lump of metal that others spent fifteen years talking to, and god knows how many years before that dreaming with. and i care; whether it’s rational or not, whether it’s normal or not, i care. and i wish she had answered when we called last night.
she’s not really dead, of course. her solar panels may be covered, her instruments are silenced; she cannot sing to us from outer space, but someday, we will make it up there. we will find her, and perhaps she’ll be a metal shell and little else, worn down by martian winds and red, red sand, but we will find her. and, in the meantime, we will remember.
opportunity let us see beyond our comprehension. i look at photos of mars and i see the valley of fire in nevada, because try as i might, i can’t tell my brain that i’m seeing another planet. but opportunity did. opportunity saw, and heard, and spoke, and the things she told us live on, even as we try and fail and try again to understand them.
(it’s dark here, too, my friend, but i promise you that spring is coming.)
i was larger there; perhaps that’s it. i was large enough for my own skin, large enough for my brain and my body and my fingertips. and now i am small inside and large outside, and my soul cannot reach my mind or my hands to tell me who it is.