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I never wanted to be a poet

Just a housewife

With a high starched collar 

And pillbox fingernails. 

I never wanted to be a poet,

I would have rather burned the waste behind my belly button

In some suburban incinerator

Made love to a drunken stop sign every night

And fallen asleep quickly

Smothered by a curdled, white ceiling

Cradled by some lightly crinkle peach sateen sheets, 

Lulled to mortgaged dreams by the sound of falling bombs. 

I never wanted to be a poet, 

To acquire a taste

For blood and words,

To live, like moss on a rock, in a century of falling ice 

And despotic wires, twisted hair and coffee filters

(The trash we used to burn accumulates. It’s suffocating me)

I never even wanted to learn to drive.

But here I am anyway,

Merging onto the 101 Northbound

Screaming fuck at the top of my lungs

A poet in spite of myself.

The Plague

A sad sort of Spanish wailing is coming from the downstairs apartment across from me. The wind is strong. The leaves are big and brittle. It is not fall. 

Everyone is LA is thinking about the plague. They are trying to avoid it. They are pretty sure they will, since they’re good people and good people never get the plague.  

And still there is wind in the trees and a sun overhead. Dolloped skies and mustard bees and halcyon sidewalks cracked up into smiles by the roots of trees and the stamping feet of city pilgrims. 

Tempt me, nature. Fallow, fickle, dribbling and then, all at once, dry. There was a song I knew in my childhood. Did it leave on the wings of some passing bird? Was it lost in the rush and the shuffle? What sun soaked moments live beyond this fishnet veil, this viral shadow dancing phantom, in and out of time? A pulsing human terror, older than this virgin sprawl, than this spewing waste of man, floats perennially on the smokeless, urban breeze. It reminds us we are human and we die. 

Still, there are spring afternoons that fall like soft strokes over a piano, black after white, black after white, a falling in rhythm, cascading and then, sadly, quiet. And then, sadly, quiet and quite alone. 

A few things I could say for sure; there was an apple orchard and a cherry red car. A rigid woman with wormish lips who worked in the library who smiled without moving her mouth.Pink paint chips and sour little flowers and the hope that one day I might be beautiful.

St. Francis

A burlaped man came to take my pulse this afternoon

and share some of the abysmal blue water of his eyes with me,

pouring it into cups shaped like words,

lilac renunciations of a world too busy tracing its fingers

over brail highways and terracotta trash,

making maps for the eyeless, the frozen, the fetid amongst us-

he spoke of strong coffee and collection plates and a noose on Christmas day.

The fountain in my courtyard burbles a holy song

that I cannot hear when you are touching me

that is too quiet to announce itself in a crowded room.

But when you are gone it sings your praises,

a song long forgotten and recently remembered.

Daphne and Apollo

I have fallen in love. I have even fallen in love in forests. But it was not the rushing water and meandering light that lit some incendiary blaze between my legs, made me sweat, made me forget my mouth and stomach. It was whiskey and a scowling hot summer that made me love you, that made me love being loved by you. It was the unfinished women all around us, a Patti Smith poster and a half-painted world that only happened to be in the forest, that wasn’t actually there. It was a tapestry I covered the world over with, it was a stained glass window which I used as a magnifying glass to solve the great mystery of the universe. And so instead of following footprints I only found the Madonna and Child on every surface, only saw your face looking out at the world and begging me to read it, only could relish in bare feet and dirty dishes and breasts which heave and weep and fuck. If I could lie to my God and doctor all my memories I would remember myself as some lithe and fleeing Daphne to your Apollo, but you and I both know that this was not our story. I have never been able to help loving like a God, pursuing flesh which evades my clutches, fumbling dumbly with trees which only seconds earlier shook not with the wind but with breath and blood. I have felt men turn to branches in my arms, felt them root and resist and leave me talking to myself in a meadow of half-remembered tendernesses. I have climbed my old lovers, carved my name into their sides, rested in their shade and in the winter torn them down for kindling. They have had their season too, our memories; shedding leaves and blossoming in spring

Plato on a foggy day

I spoke to Ms. X today about reason in Plato’s Republic, about the shapes we carry with us in our bones, the squared circles and dodecahedrons of the conscience, transient and visceral. We skipped stones over the surface, trading moments and bits of text like so much colored glass and string at a trading post. “I am worried” I said “about this city and its citizens. I worried about this order, heavy and imposing like a suit of armor over our erotic, fire-like selves; that it will put out our light. I am worried too about living in a world without hard edges, a gelatin universe. What is a body without bones? Am I destined to send myself to prison or to be forever out of doors, beyond the city walls, beset by the advances of beasts and gods and forever out of the grips of language?”

“Here it is,” I said to her “my hopeless little heart. It has loved books and men. Here it is: my shivering fear that all there is for me is a collage of brooding moments, a life lived in a petty pace from day to day, a heap of broken things, all mine and miscellaneous. All prematurely disappointed and sullen faced.”

She did not mock my crisis, or dismiss the poorly written tragedy I was lugging to and fro. Instead she simply heard me and said for my benefit: “Not so fast.”

Quickly, quickly! says the world. You’re running out of time! And whence we are headed and off what cliff we are being corralled there is no time to say. But I would rather sit in a pondering reverie than marry myself to an unexamined suitor, sell my soul to dogma or else dismiss and disengage. Today, I will be a student. I will not rush ahead. I will read each word and wonder as I will and ask with an open heart. And if no coherence visits me, if no Enunciation comes, and I must sit an empty bellied virgin and wait, then wait I will. I will wait like Jonah in the whale or like a tower bound beauty, and fill my time with spinning wheels and aquatic debris and a library of pauses and words.

The world is full of paper men and card board constellations; let them do their play and win their prizes, cry and gurgle and moan. I will watch with one eye and let the other roll back in my head.

A China Cup

So much of living is done so completely alone. In dreams I speak to birds who fly in great numbers with the changing season, the geese that follow the eternal spring from pole to pole. Even they’re flight, so unified and solemn in form, begrudges the fowl the ethereal peace its countenance suggests. We strive together, but not together. Airborne, silent, our eagle eyes arrest the rivers below at independent intervals, notice the light as it falls just so, on that flower bed there, that farmhouse, that barren patch of rock. Our breath is caught singularly, but in chests that refuse to collapse, and the love we bear, the fears we relish, look homeward and pine for true minds that ever refuse marriage.

Here is a moment alone: when love’s promise took to the heavens. I can hardly remember it now; vaguely glazed, untethered, the sky one flapping sail of blue, the earth a well-used bed-sheet, damp and lightly sticking to my back and the cold creeping persistantly in.  I cannot now remember, though one hates to think that the heart might lose such a power, that I could honestly forget the feeling that the knife of your eyes ever had the power to tear, to make bleed, to puncture. Perhaps we cannot truly be wounded more than once; perhaps such instincts stand counter to our nature. 

It is not death that calls, that courts the nerves, but perhaps only to be in myself contented, as the finest porcelain or rarest china might be contented, sated in stillness and forgetful of its own fragility. Is a china cup dead? Is a china cup alive? Can a man quite understand the staying power which such thoughts possess; that I might not put a bullet through my brain because it is not death I want. Death will not let me be as a teacup, speckled with silent color and laughing accidentally in the afternoon light. 

My mother has told me the story of her father’s death in pieces. She is temperate in her intemperance, and lets the tears come in broken batches, like the waves which come and cease and come again. And I, impatient as patrons ever are, hungrily devour each corner bound ghost, each fallen promise, each last breath, triumph and trivium. Her reticence to voice such miracles, to shape in the air the unendurable which daily she endures, and her need at times to speak what cannot be spoken anyway, all this seems right to me. And yet, it is strange: we must say what we cannot, we must hold to what will not stay; we must, and we do because we must, and yet we cannot. 

But all this majesty is far from the afternoon convulsions of my spirit. I long to be a china cup. To swoon in glassy oblivion, to be cherished and to fail to notice. 

The Rose

And what, might I ask, are you doing here?

After the lights have been shut off, the floors swept 

and the chairs put back in their places.

The trash has been collected and 

taken out to be lost and sorted and lost again.

The audience has filed into the clown car of the night, 

has been carted off and saved themselves for sights unseen

and all the eyes and ears of ancient days have sealed themselves

in an eternal sleep that restlessly resists interruption. 

What voice can reach them? 

What mortal scream would dare disturb the rhythm of their dreams,

from here beyond the veil of life where everything smells like coffee grinds

and credit cards? 

Could the poets, blind to the flames of a hell they will not see, 

ever gilding the inferno of their legacy, (they will not break under torture,) 

could they have imagined that some distant day the thought of one night cheap hotels might be a sentimental one? That sawdust and visits might take on the violet haze 

of the dying light which hung, so perfectly over so many tragedies

where real shadow and real light fought viciously for the prize of human love?

Who would listen if words, which you might have said, 

words that are left in you, which rot in you,

attempted to escape your living throat, still coated with mucus, still beating with unformed and and unfinished life?

What stories could you tell anyway, apart from a few lost moments,

ripped apart by years and resistant to ordering? 

A blue dress, cigarette burns in the carpet, 

the taste of whiskey and the rattle of aluminum cans which collect in your car.

All things out of context are poetic. 

Cheap poetry. Poetry that depends on no one,

that has no audience in particular.

But are there yet words that can coax the rose to speech?

How Many Hearts Are Left in San Francisco?

I am here tonight in San Francisco. It is eight o’clock, and I am already sitting on the bed I will use for the night, in part because I am reticent about walking the streets of this city at night, and in part because I am tired. San Francisco is well known for its forward looking facades, those row houses of tolerance and silicon savvy, and yet it seems to me, walking past the man selling acid on the corner, a woman wearing black lipstick and a fur trimmed vinyl coat, t-shirt shops, candy colored victorians, that this city of the future is in love with its past. It participates in a romanticization of summer it has never known, a single solstice that lives in infamy and forgets the many broken homes and hearts that also was that Summer of Love and the unavoidable autumn that followed. What separates the nostalgia in this town from the down-trodden pessimism of the middle west, i.e. their infatuation with the slogan Make America Great Again? In San Francisco, just like in Ohio, there is also a pining, a forgetting of pain, a half-hearted attempt to resurrect a long dead culture. Tie-dye, Janis Joplin mugs, a bevy of over priced vintage stores peddling polyester and suede, buckled boots and ripped up t-shirts — is this so different from a small town main street, lined with old fashioned store fronts, American flags, some rusted hunk of bronze dedicated to those fallen heroes perished in a myriad of battles long forsaken. But the backwards glance of San Francisco is different, it is not despairing. The nostalgia of San Francisco is the recounting of a time well loved, the heroes of another time, those day-trippers, activists, addicts, whose silhouette line the periphery of my city’s vision: these men and women, if they saw me, would love me. How differently a main street in Southern Ohio longs for yesteryear. It stands in resolute silence, storefronts empty, flags raised, and asks its past with some degree of insistence: “How did we lose it? How does a people lose the only world they’ve ever known?” It is a matter of misplaced siren songs; one chorus sings from the seat of some viscerally near horizon, and the other lays far beyond the chasm which stands between us and our past. Like some disturbed phantom, our nationhood lives out its poltergeist half-life. It cries out into the night that covers the expanse of the Great Plains, which hides the corroded corners of our fallen middle class, the ever stretching limbs of our cities, refused littered projects, suburban sprawl: “America,” she sobs, “Have you ever existed? Are you a memory gone or only a desert mirage, which calls me to a life which knows no peace and a destiny I cannot hope to speak?”

Birdies

The morning birds are awake.

They speak of dreams,

their dazed warbles slumping into one another

like stacks of battered bread.

Some speak of dragons’ nests;

huge mouths of hay and string which devour whole trees

and hold eggs the size of full grown men.

Others wake in a twittering panic.

Still drunk with sleep’s illusions,

they rise convinced they have flown too far,

eastward, past the sun,

cracking their porcelain beaks on rock solid horizon.

They shake themselves watchful in the periwinkle, desert dew.

The sounds waft indifferently through the valley,

the mountains blending together distinct, fantastical pitches,

unseen lands and unforgotten loves,

into one mournful thrum

that pulls the sun up. 

I knew it was love when...

It’s easy for me to get sentimentally attached to other people’s pasts, to the history and heartache of another era, to stories that aren’t my own. The frayed edges of a black and white photograph communicate a romance that I almost always fail to find in the technicolor dullness of my real, everyday life. Errands hide it, pauses hide it, confusion hides it, apathy hides it, so that, when all is said and done, it is very difficult to detect the elements of enchantment that a stranger might easily uncover decades from now, beneath a dusty sea of yesterdays. 

My grandmother is an exceptionally romantic woman. I don’t mean by this word to imply that she smolders in the night and hovers in the day, with orchid posture, a siren voice, and the ancient primal warmth of a thousand muse-worthy smiles. She’s no Vivian Leigh, no Ingrid Bergman, women whose mouths, it seems to me, were molded purely to tremble and be smashed passionately against some harder and listlessly unreachable jaws. She is no Beatrice. Her romance is not aloof, but profoundly approachable. Her melancholy might orbit events which transpired at the supermarket, the trials of a beloved mailman, the fugitive health of a neighbor, or of a television personality. She finds, in the visiting geese and the freshly sprouted azaleas and black eyed suzan’s, real triumph and charm. 

Like so many things which are undeniably beautiful, her romance drives me, occasionally, to despair. I’m not proud of this quality, but it can’t be helped. I wouldn’t precisely call it jealousy, it’s just that the stories that other people tell, about their vacations, funerals, love affairs, always feel more comprehensive to me than the life I am living. Stories, after all, have beginnings, middles and ends. Stories teach us lessons. My life, in contrast, seems to happen in fits and starts, peppered with pathetic, hard won maxims: “Don’t sleep with anyone on the first date.” “Eat breakfast.” “Why do you love me? is a question that quickly becomes a habit.” “Fad diets are more fun to think about than to be on.” What beginning, middle and end is there in all that? And I know my grandmother, primarily, through her stories, and the stories I have heard about her. My fingers fumble lead like through years of photographs, photocopied journal entries, newspaper clippings. Her voice, honest, sings without affectations ballads of the many people she has known and loved. Known and loved, it seems to me, in ways I cannot imagine knowing or loving anyone. 

Here is a story that I know very well. Joan met John at the Campana Factory in Batavia Illinois. My grandmother, freshly released from high school, bobbed brunette hair, “secured a job at the place right out of the shoot.” She says that it was her typing and dictation skills that set her apart from her class mates, but I am sure that her natural wit and warmth were no small help. She loved her job. I can see, in shades of grey that over the years have turned to a light brown, her dressed in a tea length, pencil skirt. Pressed, impressed, eager. The friendly clack and shuffle of a young woman eager to be useful, noticed, grown. She was lovely, doe eyed, serene. At least, this is what I see in the pictures. I myself have never been a creature of serenity. All of my innocence has been experienced by me as a gawky, groping and stumbling. Perhaps we can only find naivety beautiful in other people. It takes on a sheen in them that the natural discomfort of the state denies to its possessor. 

The story of my grandparents is not totally different from a thousand other love stories of their time. John, my grandfather, and his good friend happened to be driving by Campana. They happened to pull over. My grandfather happened to need a job. He happened to work in the candy department, assembling weight loss caramels popular at the time, and my grandmother’s desk happened to be stationed near the entrance to the cafeteria. Glances were exchanged, words tossed back and forth, carelessly, breathlessly, at a water fountain which my grandmother had walked over to not because she was thirsty but because it was next to the elevator that he took. A million and one chance beginnings, and three months later they were married. 

On their first date my grandmother wore a mouton lamb coat. She borrowed it from her boss. When she tells this story, she always includes the detail of the coat, and how it made her look puffy and not unlike a petite bear, standing next to John whose length was only accentuated by her smallness. In her telling the coat is a humorous detail, worn at the insistence of her employer for the sake of creating a sophisticated facade. Fur to a football game; how posh! And yet I cannot help but imagine how the snow, as it fell across her shoulders, as it buried itself in her dark hair, as it coaxed the pink in her cheeks to rise and blossom, must have created a bewitching topography of dark and light, and how impossible it would have been for my grandfather, with his unmatched romantic sensibility, to avoid falling in love with her. 

The sunrise of these recollections in my heart transports me; everything which is erotic in us, trusting in us, all that does the falling part when we fall in love, is ignited in me when I recall these moments. But then, of course, it is not a memory really, or at least not my memory. It’s only a story; a vivid imagining of a timeless courtship. There is an inevitable sunset which follows the brief illumination of these visions, but it is a sunset which contains me. On my better days, I can find a certain solace in the beauty of that precious and ephemeral light, which dies its thoughtlessly colorful death all around me. Perhaps, I think, there is some hope for love in the dark. 

Fires OR Why July, 2016 was the month I decided to move to Ohio.

With the millstone of a particularly disheartening election season hanging about my neck, and a thousand other daily, existential misgivings proper to the middle twenties buzzing constantly, fly-like about my head, I was not at all surprised to wake up to a blood red sun.  It rose without triumph in a black sky, and delivered listless streams ofrusted light to the city of Los Angeles, as if the day were neither privilege nor promise, but a chore, done on time, dutifully, but without zeal. Through a ghostly prism of falling ash, cascading like a silent rain and covering the city in a fine layer of corpse grey soot, through the city-smog, the morning traffic, children, mothers, political debates, though all this dusty chaos, morning arrived, as it always does, like a good habit. “So,” I thought to myself, “it’s the apocalypse. Fair enough.”  In truth, the weather irregularity was the product of a fire, which has at this point consumed tens of thousands of acres of forest land, destroyed 20 or so structures, threatened the property of 20,000 residents, and most likely killed at least one singular and irreplaceable mortal soul. It remains un-contained. Human beings, probably since the dawn of time, are fascinated by events like these.  We are captivated by natural disasters, by extremity without passion: the ancient, faceless killers from on high. They defy the mind. They resist our desire to catalog, to know, to converse. And yet, inhuman as they clearly are, do they not entice from us our most subtle and imaginative anthropomorphic meddling? Are we not tempted, and perhaps for good reasons, to give features to floods and fires, and to feel the tragedy they induce as wrath rather than randomness? Surviving calamity always demands of us that we imagine the axe of heaven is directed, in one form or another, by some species of justice, albeit a primordial ancestor of our human ethics and far older than what we might recognize as a code of law. 

How do we make sense of the inadvertent cruelty of nature? Nature, unruly, inconstant, fickle, is for man an all consuming Rorschach inkblot; she speaks so clearly precisely because of the thoughtless conditions of her inception. I fell and I slipped into being and the world is an inkblot and I’m on the universe’s couch, getting my head shrunk. Only, that’s not how it feels a lot of the time. The experience of living is not one of constant surprise, directionless twitching, particularly when the sun is red and California is burning to the ground and Trump’s voice won’t get out of my head. It’s one a hell of a pill to swallow, with all that going on, to concede that this whole thing is a giant inkblot and that the sense I’m making out the world and all its horrors is just that, sense made by me. What, after all, did I see in the inkblot of my mini apocalypse? What phantasms of light and shadow were born when the fluid universe poured itself into that vessel which offers form to content, my crystal mind, goddess of judgment, skeleton of sense? In that unhappy sky, that faceless nature, what else could I find, but gloomy tidings of a world gone to pot and terrible omens of a future that is headed flatly nowhere? An empty glass. Decidedly empty. Coated, in fact, with ash. 

But I resist these conclusions. I resent them. I am an optimist, aren’t I? Or, if I’m not, then at least shouldn’t I be? What obligations, heavy and unshakable, have seated themselves parasite-like in the depths of my soul? There are, of course, the ever culpable early-childhood experiences that, for all people, are woven into the tapestry of their reflexes. At six, I remember how my feet, still all rubbery and plump, firmly planted in the grimy matt of our carpet, held the weight of my little body. I watched her, my mother, light the candles, celebrate the moon, enjoy, engage, entertain.  Our poverty was star studded, significant, properly and deliberately hopeful. My mother does not berate the ear and corner the heart with words about the necessity of optimism is this world, (so sad, so full of men in need! Orphans! Widows! Alas! Alack!); she would cringe at the half-smile sophistry of positive thinkers and all other such traveling witch-doctors of our time. Her smile is common, and so it does not give lectures. Too many words ruin a thing like that. 

So in the spring, the young birds stretch out their unremarkable wings and attempt to fly. And so too I, at twenty-five, find myself constantly considering the origins of the unspoken optimism of my mother. I know it from her stories.  It was born from black and white television, from factories, from midwestern common sense and common decency, from cornfields and blades of grass and tree forts, cheap gin martinis in plastic cups, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, jazz, overalls. How does one recreate, emulate, the conditions for such a wordless upturn of the heart? The broth of her story has sat and stewed for decades, while mine is hardly more than water and bones. 

But then again, I wonder, perhaps their upright spine, their stubborn pulse, the fortitude of their spirit, (my family, that is), is more march than mantra. Perhaps there is no secret in hiding, that you might find and pluck and sew unto to yourself, like a severed branch, to blend up into your being the natural variety latent in nature. “Make me new!” my heart calls out to the universe, “Plant me in some other, softer soil! Warmed and nourished by all that is dank and dark and gone I would, in such an Eden, grow! I would become the hero, which the poetry of my soul desperately longs to portend!”

All these words and more words and even some things that are not yet words, (but feel very much like they are on the cusp of becoming words), ran through my head, beneath the blood-red sun and held under by a sea of ash and angst. I missed the chance to have an early start on the day, missed the fast moving train of dawn. Noon came, it felt later. I sat and sat, wasting whatever potential might have hidden itself in the creases of that the auburn afternoon, and like a poorly written tragedy, I spoke some half hearted soliloquy to myself in faded plaid pajamas. I was not even ranting aloud. My coffee got cold. 

And so the Gods appeared. They were predictably subtle in their interference. It was as if a little raincloud, like the kind you see in children’s cartoons, which gather deliberately over those malcontented talking animals, rolled out slowly on the horizon of my mind. We do not just imbue with intention the tempests that ravage our coasts, but also the storms which take place in us. My storm took the shape of a gentle rain, like the steady clop of army trained horses. They marched within me, steady drops unwittingly filling that glass which I had doomed to a dusty oblivion on a lonely shelf. She was quiet, but insistent, this cloud which made her way to center stage. Without apology, without affectation or urgency, drop after patient drop, she repeated for my benefit:

“Get up.”

“Get up.”

“Get up.”

And so I did. 

Facebook

I do not have a Facebook. The reasons for this range, depending on who I am talking to, from the obtuse and abstract considerations of a philosophy major, which I am, to the vague truisms we exchange with acquaintances when we are trying to avoid having a real conversation. “I just feel like the commodification of the soul is a hyper-phenomenon of this era—like human beings only know themselves insofar as they are able to represent themselves via pixels; it’s…like…the aesthetic portrait of a pre-formed, pre-formated screen….man….” Or sometimes “I don’t know, I just spend way to much time comparing my body and relationship status to other people. I want to live my own life free of all that shit, you know? Be in the moment?” Or else “I can’t stand the constant stream of advertisements. I don’t want the corporations spying on me anymore than they already are…” Some combination or rearrangement of these answers suffices to either end or begin a conversation, with varying degrees of satisfaction. In truth, I think human beings have a really hard time coming up with a solid and consistent answer for why they do what they do. I don’t have a Facebook. I am ambiguously proud of that fact and, other than rotating collection of partial answers, I couldn’t tell you why. 

I do worry about human connection. The lost hours, individuals, jobs, friendships, apartments. The look of a place where you used to live is a weird thing. You leave something behind, the studio, cabin, guest-house, trailer, etc., some scraps and maybe a futon along with blank walls and floors, and it gets repurposed by new tenants, (the strangest of strangers, people who live ghost lives in the bones of what we have given up on—spend their hours recovering the ribcage of a dying dream with new flesh, posters, tablecloths, a shower curtain bought on sale at Target, energy saving lightbulbs). There is so much loss. And in this world of online job searches and long distance families, it seems like people are constantly looking for means of coping with that loss—of accepting it, gilding it, living with it, or otherwise flatly denying it. Facebook is one of the ways we avoid that loss— it lets us quit remembering, frees us from the burden of the forgotten, makes goodbye hurt just a little less than it does. After all, the Face, capital F, endures. 

I wonder sometimes about how people a little older than me were affected by Facebook when it was first popularized, what those men and women felt, and how little we have access to those sensations any more. Those people who were suddenly in contact with long lost cousins, high school friends, thought the people they had found had been lost irrevocably.  Their shock is lost permanently—the generation that grew up with Facebook can never experience it, because nobody ever loses touch anymore unless they do it on purpose. There is something superficially comforting about this idea, but in truth it strikes me as a tragedy. Because there is loss, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, and now our un-lived lives, the many untrodden paths, forsaken, die their deaths in solitude. Their funerals go unattended; we prop up the skeletons of our old selves on sticks and pretend that all the people we have ever been just go on living. We’ve stopped mourning prematurely, and the result is a virtual mass grave constructed for the sake of convenience. 

I did have a Facebook at one point. I discovered it in 2005-2006, as an alternative to Myspace and the chatroom sleaze of my younger youth. My boyfriend at the time turned me on to Facebook and I started up, hiding my real age from him and the rest of the world, and busily posting photographs of myself in tribal make up at all-ages concerts across LA. The project of constructing an identity is difficult, taxing, endless. Who am I? The soul cries out into silent nights, again and again and again. Not so online. What are your interests? Favorite bands? Clothing brands? That technology might fool a child into believing the myth that their coursing hormones already do their best to confirm—that they are already a fully developed person, overflowing with wisdom and a comprehensive ideology about the world they occupy—this in itself strikes me as very problematic. But children cannot be made to understand this problem. I look a certain way, I like things, I have a personality, I am somebody. What a relief to check up on oneself in this way in ones childhood. 

And it follows you too. That’s another thing about Facebook. Perhaps one outgrows shooting unsuspecting coffeeshop patrons with water guns and painting temporary dragon tattoos on homeless wanderers, drum circles, peeing on the side of the highway. Life evolves. The experiences that make up the tapestry of our understanding pile up, we make and lose friends. But our Facebook does not forget. There is a still frame left behind, a portrait that can be clicked back to, most likely painted with at least partially closed eyes. Something to scroll through and dull the pain of unendurable confusion. 

I fell in love during my Freshman year of college. I remember looking at his Facebook, the morning after we first slept together. He was, to my 19 year old mind. perfect. We had spent the evening drinking Everclear on the floor. He was irreverent, crude. Perhaps his Facebook made promises to me that our first night together never voiced. There he was, standing thoughtfully in an autumn forest, wearing a peacoat and carrying a half finished bottle of medium-price whiskey. There again, blue eye dancing in the sun, staring away from the camera in the passenger seat of a well-used car, out on the open road. Laughing with friends. Dancing. I scrolled on. Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, clearly a strong Americana influence. I wonder now, as I recall the first few days of what would turn out to be a few years of manic highs and desperate lows, whether if in part my convictions about his character came out of the immense faith that I had placed in his Facebook. He was, and he became, infinitely more real than anyone that I had ever known. Put this is in conjunction with a growing dependency on alcohol and a penchant for elaborate dramatic fantasy, and much of the next two years of my life will make itself clear to you. In the final throes of our love affair, my room was littered with bottles. I had my second abortion of the year in December, and was keeping it a secret from my mother. I had not gone to class in a month. I stopped dreaming, praying, laughing. I missed a flight to LA, and lied to my parents about a snow storm that never occurred—a terrible coverup in a world where the weather in other parts of the world can be checked with the click of a button.

And so the years roll by. A person who was your world becomes a memory. Journal entries are composed, and lay half finished in drawers seldom visited. Here is one:

I have the overwhelming sense that I am in love with someone who no longer loves me in return. In my head I turn over the words to Autumn Leaves:

The autumn leaves, drift by my window,

The autumn leaves, red and gold.

I see your lips, the summer kisses,

the sunburned hands, I used to hold…

That minor chord which, like a needle, is threaded by our being, which penetrates that melancholy force…mysteriously bound to the human condition. What in this song makes us cry? 

We cannot, and we do not, stay heartbroken forever.

But what a wonderful thing! To watch the patina age on our memories, to fail to notice the shifting shades and watercolor inconsistency of our own minds. At first, we refuse to tell the charming stories. We cannot bear them. The only stories I could tell were about tears and shouted words and the hungry, angry lonely times. I was too fraught, to fragile to describe the light at dawn, the morning broken as softly as a promise, the unbearable cold of his gaze past me. I stayed away from forests, got rid of my blue skirt and avoided the solitude of nature. There is an overwhelming majesty to romance that is private, not social, and volatile to the extreme. It is contained entirely by the memory. It lives and dies there. It can’t be expressed on Facebook. 

And perhaps, in the impossibility of sketching such infinitely personal and unsayable things on social media, there is some comfort. Today, when so many people are so afraid of a loss of privacy they feel all around them, I am struck by the thought that perhaps privacy is not actually the kind of thing that you can lose, like your phone or your keys, but that instead it’s more like an infinite palate of shadows, whose variety adds depth and weight to the world around us. There are so many ways we can be private, so many ways to be alone, in our memory, with friends, in nature. Privacy and solitude are built into us, in the wordless and indescribable pulsing of our five senses and the fluttering shut of our eyelids, which without effort forbids the entire world its access to our consideration. No, not even the towering giant that is technology could ever rid the sacred tapestry of life of all its meandering shades of twilight; the inborn and inescapable power of humanity to be alone with itself. So long as we have eyes to see, we will retain the power to close them. Let us hope we do not forget the immense freedom that lives latent in these seemingly mundane reflexes of reality.