Teleoeschaton

I think in circles,

and wonder,

what must it be like,

to think in straight lines,

A to B to C.

Crossing west fourth,

skipping lake edge

of gray slush

under the dull shine

of high sodium.

Back where we began.

Dating the same girl.

Feet wet from misplaced winter gray.

Working the same job.

Watching the same shows

on television.

Reading the same poets

and looking for more,

trying to make something for myself

as I've tried before,

kept awake by two sirens--

one the call of a regular salary,

the other, ten hours of no-thought,

five days a week.

I've written for six months,

by force of will,

or circumstance?

To what end?

I think in words,

and words,

it's nearly endless

in bed,

longing for an end,

but there is no end

to this thinking in words.

Let us study the poets,

the philosophers,

turning symbols into words.

Study the scientists,

the mathematicians,

decipherers of those symbols,

Study the painters,

who let the symbols be.

I read the word,

eschatology.

And its everywhere now,

in Wallace and Levertov,

in crazy Terence McKenna,

and the X-Files I'm watching

again, completing a 13 year cycle,

which might mean something--

that dread solipsism,

the word creeping in,

everywhere I look,

like the distant rumble of trains

as the word is read,

and the flickering of lights

as my beloved walks beneath them.

I will never understand her:

on my way to work,

she said she would get high,

and listen to music,

and light candles,

and so I asked her,

promise me this:

look at the clock,

when you think fifteen minutes have passed,

and that night I got a text--

“I'm sorry to say, but time is passing,

as it always does.”

I look into her eyes,

and see myself reflected there,

and hope it's proof

that she is there,

watching me,

and that I am here,

being watched,

and hope that

being watched

is proof enough,

to know I am.

To know we are,

and never mind the end times,

once around,

in fullness,

together,

will be

our lot.

The Quiet Truth

We speak our truths

to each other

apologizing

for how corny

they sound.

And then apologize

for our apologies,

because the truth

when spoken

face to face

is never corny.

The next morning,

I read Mary Oliver

on the couch

with the black cat

indulging me

and the orange one

looking out the window,

the street's gray slush,

the browning evergreens

on top of trash bags

and trash bags.

I wrote poems

about death once.

Now

I write poems

about life.

Dishes

I roll my sleeves up,

home from an errand,

before the sink.

The dish water runs

at times too hot,

at times too cold,

often barely at all.

I don't pray much

these days

but if I had to,

   I would pray for water;

   a prayer of thanks,

   to the fact

   that I can

   any time I want

   drink water

   from a faucet,

   cold, perfect water

   from a kitchen faucet.

In my hands,

cupped together,

the cool running

down the sides,

through my fingers,

   like a chalice,

   raised to my lips, 

   ready to drink,

   with thanks.

It's like a sacrament

   (but doesn't need

   transubstantiating)

its essence

already

its own.

Across the Twitterverse

I'll grow my hair long now;

stop shaving,

sleep in and drink coffee

late into the morning.

I'll wear flannels

over big belt buckles

and Levi's jeans,

and engineer's boots.

I'll listen to the music of now,

the songs of escape,

the death of the suburbs,

the death of the city,

the slow death of hope itself.

I'll listen to the music of then,

The Byrds, Dylan and the Dead,

grow my hair long,

stop shaving, and wonder

at these ten years.

The music of joy,

of glittering lakes

and trees alive

and starscapes,

the swelling endless now.

I'm done with the lie;

done with no hope

and no future,

the tomorrow they promised us.

We dream of escape,

of Laurel Canyon hipsters

with headbands

and people parties.

We dream of Greenpoint,

Williamsburgh, Park Slope,

and Prospect Heights,

of a local food revolution.

We hope.

We pray that

the social network

will save us

from ourselves.

But there is no way forward

that does not sacrifice

the fullness of this life;

we, of a type,

imagined,

and sold--

tribe by tribe,

until the idea

seems our own.

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver,

I've read your swan song:

full of joy,

joy, joy

in every thing.

I read too late last night

and woke to another sore throat.

I fed the cats and drank coffee.

I sit writing at a window,

two day's snow in the window box

reaching to the second bar

of the child proofed windows

and the tree in the courtyard,

its dessicated pods

tenacious to spite the wind.

The half finished building

across the way obstructs the view:

one year and six months

I'd watched the trucks of 125th. Street

Postal Station back in and out,

the workers on their union breaks.

I am a free lance.

That was the dream,

wasn't it?

Not far off.

I'd imagined more squalor.

More despair.

Cheaper rent,

more downtown?

A smaller place,

certainly.

Beer.

I imagined us together,

skinny and desperate,

ageless in my teenage fantasy,

her my only connection to an adult future,

lost and found,

what some call fate.

That was the dream.

And now this:

a free lance.

Imagine:

the romance of it all,

the poetry, the food,

all of it.

"In five years,

he'll be twenty seven,"

my ex-girlfriend's

Grandmother had said.

In two months,

I'll be twenty seven.

This may be a quarter life crisis--

a social phenomenon

for the new millennium,

years to go,

before my swan song.

I read late into the night

and wake,

with sore throat,

to feed the cats,

and try to write,

and to find that joy,

in this life,

in this place.

Blank Generation

This is a brief experiment in multi-media poetry. A thought I had regarding the future of publishing as E-readers and "apps" take over the market...

A generation past,

blank by choice,

unlike our current blankness,

one of circumstance.

How many before?

The wasteland gave way

to the roaring twenties,

a Great Depression,

and finally a world war,

at the end of which appeared

the beats.

A pause between wars,

where the American Dream

was not shared by all,

not by those that saw past it.

It was the hippies who took over,

during the next war,

and it was all on television.

They could promise that the revolution

would not be televised,

but it was too late for that:

the Civil Rights Act 
had been signed,

the war ended troop by troop

and that generation wasted away

or else got rich in the end

until the boom went bust.

The apocalypse, now,

a bang indeed:

the whimper in the response--

ours to clean up,

ours to grow old with,

ours to fret away,

anxious, sleepless nights,

wondering at tomorrow.

Memories I May Have Had (Sister: One)

First Draft

Memories I May Have Had

Sister (One)

She sent me a text

to ask me why

I only have a brother

when I write.

As if

there were some

intention behind that.

Even though

the time period involved

would make her three

or four. Five at the outside,

and the only memories I have

of her at that age are spotty at best.

In pictures she has bangs

(a variation of the haircut

we boys had,

the bowl but longer on the side,

framing her smiling face

like a cartoon of a smiling

little girl with an inverted parabola

for hair).

She sent me a text

to ask me why

I only have a brother

when I write.

But my memories of her

are so entwined with

his that when I write of him

I'm implicitly writing of her:

coming home from the hospital

and my displacement from my bedroom,

a thirteen year diaspora

wherein I shared a room with the same boy

who had stormed into the room that had been mine

before it was hers

and stomped my lincoln log house,

razed it, clear cut logs scattered across the ground.

And then she was there,

pink from the hospital,

in a basket in the living room,

and we wondered where she'd come from,

and how,

and watched her grow

until one day she was in college

and we were in our late twenties

and she texted me

to ask why

when I write

I only have a brother

the same brother

who was my partner

in crime, when she cried

and cried

half the day

and we reached into the medicine cabinet,

looking for something to stop the crying,

mother was doing who knows what

and finding the Ambesol that we somehow knew

was for soothing the pain of her teething jaws,

reached over the side of the crib and rubbed it

over her bleeding gums and went back to our room.

but the crying didn't stop so reaching over her crib

again we rubbed it into her torn flesh

and again, squeezing the tube until

mother found us

and put a stop to our well intentioned overdose.

this poem is for the sister

that texted me,

wondering why

when I write

I only have a brother.

Submission to M.P.

below are two poems I submitted to a small press in Port Townsend, WA, where I lived for 2.5 years. "Someday" contains a minor revision:

Someday

What does it mean,
to you, she asks?

This reading into
you always do?

I'd been obsessed
with eternal return;
the idea came to me--
overwhelmed,
I stared into the uncanny,
swirling void,
before I knew there were words,
before I knew
I was not alone
there.

What does it mean?
Why the pursuit?

It doesn't mean anything,
but mind games,
and perhaps a little comfort
before I go to bed at night,
like warm milk and Valerian root,
or the prayers I would say as a boy
to that bearded thing--
and the ritual that went with it,
to fight off imagined hordes
of crawling insects
swelling up from the basement,
racing towards my bedroom:
to swallow me up and drag me
back with them, the rustling crunch
beneath me.

Just a little bit
before we sleep.

She's ok with neurons and chemistry;
I need this sacred geometry:
imagined circles
upon circles,
looping ever forward:
an expanding universe,
collapsing into itself
to expand again,
and so it goes.

I jump in memory time,
in backward loops
like Billy Pilgrim
only more mundane.

I have no other worlds to visit,
no future mes to see.

Only this life,
stretching backwards behind me,
a string from my birth,
I gather up from time to time,
and visit different spots along the way.

But more than that,
the chance to live again,
this self same life,
but better
bit by bit,
a little better.

I want to make a contribution
to the canon,
and someday will,
given my midnight
thought experiments;
but for now,
I don't have the vision for poems,
or the toughness for prose.

And problems arise,
as they are wont--
if I improve,
wouldn't everyone else,
with more to give
and more to see?
The mystics and visionaries,
the prophets and poets
and painters and saints?

But someday,
when Plath and Sexton haven't killed themselves,
when Kurt and Ernest don't put guns in their mouths,
when Fitzgerald doesn't drink himself to death,
when Hitler is nothing but a doddering old man
in threadbare pajamas muttering absurdities
to anyone who would listen (but no one does),
maybe then I'll find the poem inside,
give voice to it,
set it free.

Columbus

Tabonuco,
bought at the Bear Mountain Pow-wow
from the single Taino booth,
first thing I smelled,
that sweet wafting resin,
carried on the wind,
drawing me in.

Tabonuco
burnt in clay pots
as tribute to a past
I can't remember.

In the rain,
in Harriman,
I read about Columbus
and his account
of my people
as gregarious
as joyful
as generous.

So generous, in fact,
that his demands for tribute unmet,
he cut off their hands,
left them to bleed out
on the jungle floor.

We disdain Columbus
for what he did
to the North American Continent,
this half truth shared in classrooms,
forgetting
it wasn't the red man
but the brown
that Columbus first broke,
that joyful people
with insufficient offerings
and no longer hands
for giving.

I share those bloodlines:
my parents met, dated, married
in the Bronx,
like Sharks and Jets.

Tabonuco,
burnt in clay pots,
in tribute 
and mourning,
for a past I can’t remember.

Raised eating pasta
and red sauce,
sfogiatelle and crown roast
at Christ's Mass,
my white skin,
and the arias
that would float through our home
so many evenings.

Forgetting
an incompatible legacy,
that burns inside.

Submission to Autumn Sky Poetry

The following poems have been submitted to a neat online journal, "Autumn Sky Poetry"; They contain minor revisions for those interested.


Your English Background

You, the land.
Razed and plowed,
deep furrows running through
where forest once stood.

And now, again,
second growth,
in scattered poles,
bracken, peat and bog,
high winds of highlands.

You bear the heft
of Sarsen,
dragged across the windy plain,
land shaped like blue stone,
bit by bit
until

having chipped away,
the edges no longer sharp
but shorn by patient hands,
you give witness,
watchman like,
ghastly Cerberus,
Avon, Lethe or Styx,
no matter:

You,
this foreign land.

Shaped by man,
reclaimed at last,
sprung
from your forever womb.

The Gift

I am everything

inside this box,

felt lined,

blood red.

Lacquered mahogany,

fancifully etched

by some careful hand

with images of swirling demons

beneath

a veil of mist.

You have the key,

but you dare not open the box.

You the disease,

You the cure.

Pandora,

I am what's inside.

But you can not look;

only cherish this box:

intricately carved,

polished, finished to a high gloss

that blood red hinting

at depths and depths.

You have the key;

you have the box.

I am inside--

patience.

You, the disease.

You, the cure.

Hope

is what's left behind.

Sylvia

Sylvia Plath,
I went in for Ariel,

but the copy in stock was hardcover, glossy,
and there next to it were your collected works,
1956-1963,
poems you’d written right up until that final cold February,
just days before my birthday,

that you stuck your head in the oven.

You were thirty. 
You had two children.
Your husband left you for another woman
because you couldn't fix yourself
and when she couldn't fix herself 
he didn't leave

but she went out
in a similar manner.

I try to calculate how may poems you wrote
between twenty six and thirty one
and how many I've written up to now,
and how they’d stack up.

I wonder at the backhanded compliments I’ve received over the years:
from Devon, “Chris could cook circles around you,
but he’s unreliable. I need someone I can count on.”

Ted Hughes said Sylvia never scrapped a poem once written.
She approached her writing with an artisan dedication--
if she couldn't make a table, she’d settle for a chair,
an ottoman, an end table. Sylvia Plath?

What does that leave me?
Poems like whittled spoons for stirring beans over camp fires?
Bent brass door handles fitted over the steel drum body of a bullet smoker?
Glued together mugs full of pencils and wooden beads,
an old triumph badge and bent safety pins?

I might as well stick my head in an oven at that rate.
Just to see, of course--they’re all electric anyway.

It’s my vanity that keeps me from the full go--
is there any dignified way?
Chicken legs at obscene angles, half in half out the oven door?
The crushing splay of rushing pavement and the gawking crowds?
The liquid evacuation following the kicked out chair?
The choking blue, the foaming mouth, the aspiration of vomit?

No, no, 
I won’t be convinced--
just stick to silly love poems,
free form literalism 
and call it a hobby.

Nevermind.
A drop in the ocean
with no room for more.

Sundries

The orchid on the table is dying;

shriveled leaves curling back into itself.

Someone could have changed the water,

but there were other things to attend to:

the dishes in the sink, for instance.

The hairball in the middle of the bedroom.

Visiting friends in the country,

and wondering at the lack of clutter in their homes:

"They have more space," I said.

and I meant it then, but now wonder.

We could have that space, if we wanted it.

but there is a pushing against,

and the space between

can not be filled.

Things are crowded out,

little things--

the pile of clothes at the foot of our bed,

the flower, curled and dry on the table.

Longing to be filled,

we push towards each other,

only to be repelled

by the space between.

The orchid on the table is dying.

who will take care of it this time?

Your English Background

You, the land,
razed and plowed,
deep furrows running through
where forest once stood.

And now, again,
second growth,
in scattered poles,
bracken, peat and bog,
high winds of highlands.

You bear the heft
of Sarsen,
dragged across the windy plain,
land shaped like blue stone,
bit by bit
until

having chipped away,
the edges no longer sharp
but shorn by patient hands,
you give witness,
watchman like,
ghastly Cerberus,
Avon, Lethe or Styx,
no matter:

You,
this foreign land.

Shaped by man,
reclaimed at last,
sprung
from your forever womb.

Someday

Slight revision given a comment; I think rearranging the stanzas helps a little bit.

Someday

What does it mean,
to you, she asks?

This reading into
you always do?

I'd been obsessed
with eternal return;
the idea came to me--
overwhelmed,
I stared into the uncanny,
swirling void,
before I knew there were words,
before I knew
I was not alone
there.

What does it mean?
Why the pursuit?

It doesn't mean anything,
but mind games,
and perhaps a little comfort
before I go to bed at night,
like warm milk and Valerian root
or the prayers I would say as a boy
to that bearded thing
and the ritual that went with it,
to fight off imagined hordes
of crawling insects
swelling up from the basement
racing towards my bedroom
to swallow me up and drag me
back with them, the rustling crunch
beneath me.

Just a little bit
before we sleep--
we see them everywhere,
the patterns that we want to,
and dismiss the data that doesn't fit.

She's ok with neurons and chemistry;
I need this sacred geometry:
imagined circles
upon circles,
looping ever forward:
an expanding universe,
collapsing into itself
to expand again,
and so it goes.

I jump in memory time
in backward loops
like Billy Pilgrim
only more mundane.
I have no other worlds to visit,
no future mes to see.
Only this life,
stretching backwards behind me,
a string from my birth,
I gather up from time to time,
and visit different spots along the way.

But more than that,
the chance to live again,
this self same life,
but better
bit by bit,
a little better.

I want to make a contribution
to the canon,
and someday will,
given my midnight
thought experiments;
but for now,
I don't have the vision for poems,
or the toughness for prose.

and problems arise,
as they are wont--
if I improve,
wouldn't everyone else,
with more to give
and more to see?
The mystics and visionaries,
the prophets and poets
and painters and saints?

But someday,
when Plath and Sexton haven't killed themselves,
when Kurt and Ernest don't put guns in their mouths,
when Fitzgerald doesn't drink himself to death,
when Hitler is nothing but a doddering old man
in threadbare pajamas muttering absurdities
to anyone who would listen (but no one does),
maybe then I'll find the poem inside,
give voice to it,
set it free.

The Gift

I am everything

inside this box,

felt lined,

blood red

lacquered mahogany,

fancifully etched

by some careful hand

with images of swirling demons

beneath

a veil of mist.

You have the key,

but you dare not open the box.

You the disease,

You the cure.

Pandora,

I am what's inside.

But you can not look;

only cherish this box:

intricately carved,

polished, finished to a high gloss

that blood red hinting

at depths and depths.

You have the key;

you have the box.

I am inside--

patience.

You the disease,

you the cure.

Someday

What does it mean,

to you, she asks?

This reading into

you always do?

I've been obsessed

with eternal return:

ever since I got stoned one day,

and convinced that I had been there

but before I did enough googling

to find a word for what I'd seen.

What does it mean?

Why the pursuit?

It doesn't mean anything,

but mind games,

and perhaps a little comfort

before I go to bed at night,

like warm milk and valerian root

or the prayers I would say as a boy

to that bearded thing

and the ritual that went with it,

to fight off imagined hordes

of crawling insects

swelling up from the basement

racing towards my bedroom

to swallow me up and drag me

back with them, the rustling crunch

beneath me.

Just a little bit

before we sleep--

we see them everywhere,

the patterns that we want to,

and dismiss the data that doesn't fit.

She's ok with neurons and chemistry;

I need this sacred geometry:

imagined circles

upon circles,

looping ever forward:

an expanding universe,

collapsing into itself

to expand again,

and so it goes.

I jump in memory time

in backward loops

like Billy Pilgrim

only more mundane.

I have no other worlds to visit,

no future mes to see.

Only this life,

stretching backwards behind me,

a string from my birth,

I gather up from time to time,

and visit different spots along the way.

But more than that,

the chance to live again,

this self same life,

but better

bit by bit,

a little better.

I want to make a contribution

to the canon,

and someday will,

given my midnight

thought experiments.

But problems arise,

as they are wont--

if I improve,

wouldn't everyone else,

with more to give

and more to see?

The mystics and visionaries,

the prophets and poets

and painters and saints?

I don't have enough

vision for poem,

or toughness for prose.

But someday,

when Plath and Sexton

haven't killed themselves,

when Kurt doesn't put the gun in his mouth,

when Fitzgerald doesn't drink himself to death,

when Hitler is nothing but a doddering old man

in threadbare pajamas muttering absurdities

to anyone who would listen (but no one does),

maybe then I'll find the poem inside,

give voice to it,

set it free.

5 Poems by Gary Snyder

One of my absolute favorites.

Thoughts and requests

The little thing at the top of the page says, "poem a week at least," and that was my intention anyway, but I've managed to be disciplined enough to write nearly every day and post almost as frequently. Mostly rough drafts, and then edits, keeping the first draft in the comment section to track my progress.

My manuscript is in a form where I'm finally just editing it, deciding which of my "darlings" to kill, as a friend once put it. I think about Sylvia Plath and the revolving collection she carried around for years, her albatross, finally published as Collosus after countless additions and subtractions and dozens of names.

I'm trying to decide what to do with myself. Amidst a flood of conflicting information about what it means to be a writer these days, with print in its death throes, and MFA programs spitting out graduates and who go on to create yet more MFA programs...

I'm ambivalent about so much, but I want this venue to be my workshop, and that's the request:
comment. follow. criticize. be brutal. scathe me.

I can take it, and learn and edit, and grow.

Maybe there's room for at least one writer to make it outside the program.  I refuse to be a hobbyist.

Thanksgiving

Sometimes, at night, I put on a bandanna, to keep the hair out of my eyes. It's getting long in the front, and I think I look like Justin Beiber. It gets in my tea when I'm drinking it, and hangs in front of me when I'm eating cereal, so little flecks of milk get into the tips of my bangs. Once, at a concert, the music was too loud, and I didn't have any ear plugs, so I chewed a stick of gum until the flavor went out of it, and split it in half, formed two little balls of gum, stuck them in my ears to keep them from ringing the next morning. But my hair stuck to the gum, and I kept picking at it, wishing it would go away and wondering if anyone could tell it was there, and so I took the gum out and stuck it under the seat at the theater, and figured a little tinnitus was better then a lot of gum in my hair.

I could wear a hat, but I think the bandanna makes me look like David Foster Wallace, and I like that about it. My girlfriend doesn't know who he is, but that's ok--she's a scientist, and I'm an artist, and we keep each grounded. She reigns me in when I tend towards the solipsism that Wallace had warned of, and I try to get her to let go a little bit when she gets scared about what's going to happen after grad school.

That's about as ironic as the bandanna, and any comparison to DFW, because fuck if I know what I'm going to do with my life, and I'm terrified all the time.

Most of us are. We sat in my girlfriend's parent's living room and smoked and talked about our lives and what we were doing with them, and the machine that we were feeding, with little bits of our soul, day after day, so that people with money we can't even begin to fathom can accesorize their toddler's bathroom with brass knobs and silver trinkets and catered holiday parties for their fancy parents and their fancy friends and their fancy co-workers.

There were four of us. One was over the east coast entirely. My girlfriend and I were over the city. The fourth didn't know quite what she wanted but it wasn't this. What did we do? It's not like it was advertising, or finance, or law or medicine--nothing like that. Those are the kind of jobs that might suck the life out of you, a little bit, but at least you could count on a "return on investment."

I wanted to make that kind of money. I daydreamed about it, and there was a yearning, as long as I can remember, to have those brass-fixtured doorknobs and toilet fixtures, to have a view of central park from the top of a building, to come home to an impeccably kept house, to a staff and a wife that didn't have to work but could sit on boards of various charities, to have dinner on the table by eight and to summer somewhere ending in a "ton." I've always been honest about that.

I remember lying in bed with an ex-girlfriend, one of those times when we were trying to be intimate, her prying things out of me that didn't want prying, and I reluctantly offered, "well I do have class issues," and she looked at me and almost laughed before saying, "Hon, you have a Great Gatsby tattoo. I know you have class issues.

But we weren't there, none of us. I had one friend, maybe, that was almost there, but he was as stuck and miserable and perplexed as the rest of us, said it was a means to an end, that at least he could travel, but dammit if he didn't make it to the gym every night, the simmering resentment of long dinners with clients, of ties and blazers and wool pants and starched shirts and cocktail after cocktail, well he'd literally explode. He didn't even enjoy drinking anymore--the only time he drank was to win the trust and faith of anxious millionaires.

For all we cared about we did, we might as well be making widgets and sprockets, but we longed for a hula hoop that might set us free. Anything, really, anything at all.

We sat together, close, on the big soft red couch, with blankets, and the big soft red leather chair, and the paisley recliner, with crystal glasses brought out for the occasion, some nice pinot, some sparkling cider. One of us was knitting, and talking about how work was literally killing her. I shared the story about the time I ended up in the hospital, cellulitis of the knee brought on by too much work and not enough sleep.

I had just watched a documentary on Woodstock -- then and now, and when I closed my eyes, I could see Yasgur's farm, and the pond, the rolling hills in the distance and the second growth forest, and imagine a little house and two little offices, and a garden, where we could live and work and play.

Nora, sitting next to me, knitting, wanted to move to California.

Sheila thought we should all go into business together--just all pick up and move, and I don't know, buy some land, and she and Nora could run a hardware store, and of course Lee and I could cook for everyone (have you tasted her key lime pie? It's incredible; it literally convinced me to marry her). It sounded a lot like the Hog Farm Commune but it was probably just because I was stoned still, and had just seen a film about it.

I said I couldn't really see myself leaving the east coast. Aren't family and friends important? It was the day after Thanksgiving, and I was feeling grateful to have had my family and Lee's family at one big long table and all of the talking was a group effort and as much as her mother and my uncle could get on my nerves on occasion, they were family and wasn't it nice to be a part of, to contribute in small ways and big ways?

Sheila said that if we just went, maybe our families would follow us. And I closed my eyes and there were the red woods, and the ancient first growth forests, moss over everything, ever green, and soft trails not like the rocky trails of new england, and the constant drizzle that if you thought of it in a certain way seemed to feed everything, all the time.

But New England, and my sense of place--I was born here. Can you imagine? Lee's mother grew up on the west coast, and she grew up on the east coast, and there is nothing that will ever change that fact for them--do we really want out children to have a completely different frame of reference, a shared set of childhood memories we'll never ever be connected to?

Whatever we do, we need to work for ourselves, I said, on our terms. There was a general nodding of heads, Nora knitting next to me, Sheila curled up in the chair across, Lee blowing out the candles on the mantle that had burnt down over the last hour or two. Something that means something.

I'm leaving my job in a month or so. And I'm terrified, because sometimes it seems like a certain level of financial stability is the most important thing there is. But I've been reading and writing and thinking about reading and writing, and if making less money means there's more room for that, then I'll be that much happier, and I'll have that much more energy to give and I don't know, I'm crossing my fingers and maybe it'll be ok?

Nora nodded, her scarf was twice the length it had been when we sat down and she agreed that the happiest of our friends was the one who wasn't making much money, but doing the projects that he was interested in and sooner or later he'd probably be light years ahead of all of us because he got such an early start.

Are we that old? We are. The children that we knew when we were in high school, that seemed so much younger then are graduating college. Our friends are getting married. I'm getting married. And soon we'll be thirty, and when someone says they haven't talked to so and so in years, I can conceive of that, as much as I can conceive of not talking to so and so for as many more years, or seeing him briefly but not again, and losing touch over time, ten, twenty years from now, when maybe, finally, we'll be doing something that feels right.

It was getting on one thirty. Nora got up to leave. Her coat was on, the yarn in her bag, we hugged goodbye. We walked Sheila to the guest bedroom and Lee and I brushed our teeth together in the bathroom, washed our faces and crawled into bed. We slept through the night and into the morning, woke at ten to coffee and toaster waffles, a new day.

That evening, I walked my parent's dog, through the fallen brown leaves of the park, listening to them rustle over my boots as we walked. The trees were empty finally. It's almost December. It wasn't dark just yet, but would be soon, and the conviction of the night before was almost lost, but turning the corner I held the leash and smiled, remembering that once, the night before, I knew I had everything I wanted, and in that moment I still did, and would again.