Like Meat from Bone

Threads, fibers, and some pulling apart

The past two weeks have been newly demanding on the professional front, and sometime this morning Ian asked me if I’ve made time to “write for pleasure,” a phrase that rang so jarring and strange that I couldn’t tell if it was more contradictory or more foreign. Seeing most of what I encounter through the perspectives of what I’ve so far gleaned from my students — who are emphatically not a monolith, thus lending my visions a set of contradictory prisms from which to observe through — I’ve been uncharacteristically detached from many of my own opinions. When a sour-faced woman glared down at me from her SUV as she blocked the cross-walk, the Walk timer eroding each second and leaving me unable to cross, I fumed, and when she lurched forward only to have to wait on passing cars herself, I shouted, “You didn’t make yourself go any faster! AND I can’t cross!” and through my fury I thought, “That’s an incident appropriate for Hot and Disabled.”

Which it is, but at the same time, the event has come and gone. The shape of her mouth was cartoonishly villianous in its dismissive expression, but what more is there to say? I could tell you that every time I cross in front of one of those cars that are approximately 7 feet off the ground and seem bent on speed at all costs, I think, “I better not die here,” and then I think, “of everywhere I’ve ever lived, Milledgeville is the place I would most resent having to spend my final moments,” but that’s not essay fodder, really, is it? When the town’s lack of sidewalks and prevalence of monstrous trucks (if not literal Monster Trucks) gets to me, I think fondly and unbidden of our 9th-floor view in San Francisco, the Pacific a rich blue ripple on clear days, Lake Merced always more majestic from above than close-up, but still a relaxing presence.

Shards of old lives tend to come back to me when I pass a certain threshold of stress. With those memories come weirdly vivid portraits old selves, of what they wanted, which is to say what I thought I wanted, spilling into an amorphousness that doesn’t lend itself to opinions, conclusions. And just when I try to draw conclusions for coherency’s sake — a simple, direct one, say: wow this class hates this essay — the next class comes along and they love the same essay. Here I thought I was someone who embraced uncertainty, welcomed change, lived a life of more voluntary moves than many people make in far more years, and suddenly I’m craving conclusions. ‘What does this prove?’

The sheer volume of Jesus that courses through the campus on which I’m employed is an everyday force that I thought I’d be used to by now, but I’m not only not used to it: I’m less adjusted, I think, than I was a year ago, or perhaps I’m more in touch with my frustration at people drawing conclusions en masse as though they can be proven. (This is no disrespect to faith of any stripe, just to matter-of-fact statements spoken with the dry conviction of a statistic.) Not since my two years of high school in Wheaton, Illinois have I felt this much like the one non-Christian out, and that adds a level of labor to my communications that I wasn’t expecting, but — this is important — it’s one my students make easier by virtue of their genuineness. Over a year in Georgia and I’ve never heard anyone use Christianity to justify bigotry of any kind, nor did I have any compunctions about identifying publicly as part of the LGBTQ+ community as one of several examples I gave for myself when I asked my students to journal about the communities they’re a part of. Things are, overall, good. But I think I thought an MFA program would be an answer to my loneliness, a sudden rush of belonging, a conclusion to a trajectory I can’t even surmise.

It’s not.

I don’t blame the sweet town of Milledgeville for this being the case. The mental health issues I work through would have followed me anywhere I’d moved. I shouldered them poorly in San Francisco because of a lack of proper treatment, and they held me back in Boston, in Seattle, in California locations great and small. But part of what the MFA pamphlet promises is entry into a ‘community of writers.’ Intuitively, I did not add ‘writers’ to my own list of communities I consider myself part of, and if you asked me why I once considered myself Among Them and for the better part of the year-or-so have not, I wouldn’t know how to answer. There are so many things I don’t know how to answer, I don’t even know anymore what questions to form.

It’s September, or so the Gregorian calendar tells us, but Georgia swelters on. Fall seems like something from a distant era, a dream several people had once and told us about, but with so many contradictory details that we don’t understand what Fall is supposed to be. I own wool skirts and wool hats and long-sleeved shirts and pants made of materials other than linen, but why? I’ve always thought of Fall as crisp reality and summer as a dream, but it’s the other way around here.

In deference to the weather I re-devoured my favorite comfort read that I usually associate with summer, Francesca Lia Block’s Blood Roses, a lyrical collection of quintessentially-LA short stories. California seems to exist in defiance of Georgia or vice versa. As voices from what I almost want to call “back home” express reasonable doubt about Kamala Harris’s conservative policies, junk mail addressed to me or Ian or The [one of our last names] Family calls her an “EXTREME LIBERAL,” as though the American political system has ever made such a politician possible.

A 3-year graduate program suggests a cohesive narrative, but Year 2 has almost nothing in common with Year 1 other than the fact that we live in the same house (itself, in fairness, something of a noteworthy detail considering the number of times Ian and I have moved). I’ve never craved linear developments the way I’m craving them now, for life to move as smoothly cause-and-effectly as the adorable dark-plumaged bird with the white belly feathers who started making a resting-spot of our carport last year, first by nestling into a little hook in the corner, then by perching on the spines of an upturned rake. He was tiny, then, a little spherical burst of feathers, and then he was gone, and we hoped he didn’t get consumed by any of the neighborhood cats. A few mornings ago, as I drank my coffee, I saw him out the window, sleek and grown, but unmistakably the same bird, the same deep-navy-and-white feathers, perched on the rake, looking around, just chillin.’ I’m glad he’s doing well and I’m glad he still comes by. Our pet wild bird, our wild pet bird, a constant.

Maybe my daily classroom-proximity to so many people who are at an overwhelming but exciting new chapter in their lives is influencing my notions about stability, making me feel there’s not enough of it anywhere or that I’ve never needed it the way I need it now. Maybe for a host of reasons I’m more tired than I was at this time last year and feel like I need something extra secure to hold onto, to keep my balance. Just as likely, the certainties I would have bet on in my first months of this MFA program were illusory, never the solidly-backed evidence-rich conclusions I thought they were, so that while I feel I’m now without something, maybe I’m simply not lying to myself about certainties anymore.

Working in a tradition-laden region like the South means encountering many steadfast narratives — narratives about what family means, what a successful career looks like, what’s important and will remain important, narratives about what needs to change, narratives about what can’t change. California’s narratives are more fluid on the surface, but have their own constraints: narratives about who friends are and what friendship is for, narratives about what a fulfilling life entails, narratives about youthfulness and vitality, narratives about fun.

I’m not sick of stories, exactly. But I’m sick of the conviction that so often comes with them. I’m sick of the implicit or explicit insistance that once we’ve told a story, we’ve established how things are and how they will remain. Maybe I’m being unfair to stories, assuming an Ending that doesn’t have to be — maybe I’m disproportionately ruled by Aristotelian structure, the final act. Or maybe, caught up in the whirlwind-swirl of youthful certainty that so often defines US college campuses, I can’t help remembering how excited I once was about being so sure of so much.

Here’s to a season of change. May it come with literal and figurative milder air, and its share of electrifying good-surprises.

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