The break is over and I’m back at school—which is good. While a rest was absolutely both nice and necessary, I’m glad to get back to regular life. I have a bunch of work on my plate now that is, honestly, sort of cool. I just arranged an interview with a fascinating and bowtie-wearing professor of mine (to talk about clothes—which will, I hope, be great fun). In one of my classes, I have the option of writing the first chapter of a novel instead of a final paper, which I think I am going to do because why on earth not. A lot of my upcoming projects and papers have something to do with popular culture, which is one of the things I enjoy studying the most—so although there's a lot to think about, it's interesting. I have good books to read. Classes are over in seven weeks and the semester is over in nine. It’s completely insane. Today felt as long as a year, and still, somehow, it’s like I can’t keep life in my hands long enough to look it in the eyes.

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I sit here and write because I don't really know what else to do. Writing feels like something. It isn't studying and it isn't working on a paper but it's something. I hold every thought like a bird in my hands and then, one by one all day, I let them go. I let them go here, or in a journal or in the margins of my notebooks or in e-mail drafts I send to myself or on the backs of grocery receipts. Wherever I go, there are words in my wake, like feathers.

I know the poet I've been paired with, now. We've been e-mailing back and forth—mostly, so far, I send him poems and he says, "Okay, but send me more poems," and then I send him more poems and all the time I think, Good Lord, please understand that I really don't know what the hell I'm doing. 

We are supposed to do a reading—together—at the end of March. The thought of it both excites and terrifies me. I've always held on to poetry like you hold on to juicy gossip—you kind of want to talk about it but you know it’s smarter if you don’t. It isn’t that it’s a secret, but I keep quiet because it’s the kind of thing I know most people don’t “get.” I love this and it makes me happy but what if nobody understands.

I know it doesn’t matter—and, ultimately, one poetry reading is both exciting and not that consequential in the long run. I’ve never done anything like this before and it somehow feels important, even if it makes me nervous. This means something to me. 

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It's Reading Week and I am at home and neglecting all my reading, which is a combination of last-semester-itis and the fact that I am exhausted. In the mornings I drink coffee and fill the pages of my journal, and in the evenings I curl around my mom on the couch like a kitten and try my best to keep up with my parents' intricately planned t.v. schedule. There are moments where I care about the fact that I am leaving things undone, but they're few. 

On Sunday my whole extended family had dinner at my grandma's house. My aunts crowded around my face because I guess my glasses look just like the pair my great-grandmother used to wear, which makes me love them even more than I do already. From what I've heard of my great-grandmother, she was a terrifying woman, for reasons both related and unrelated to the fact that she immigrated to Canada from Ukraine completely on her own. Which is unheard of.

I wonder if that kind of shocking independence is something that's inherited and if there's some of that bravery in me somewhere, too--and I hope so. I'm soft, I know--I cry and I'm scared and I think about everything twice (at least). But I also give my whole heart to everything, always, and regardless of the consequences I don't ever want to stop. 

And that counts for something, I think. 

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I won a literary competition. Life continues to astound me. 

My professor made my whole class enter. I pulled together some poetry I'd written a year ago and willed myself not to think about the "real" writers who might read it and what they'd say. Once I'd handed in the collection, though, it really didn't cross my mind again—because the prize is big and I’m just this silly poet wannabe and what are the chances and I’ll probably never meet the people who pick apart my work so it doesn’t matter if they hate it.  I eventually forgot about it.

And then I won.

I know very little about the details of this contest (my prof said, "5 poems," and I said, "Okay," and that was that). I know there's an honorarium of some sort. The coolest part, though, is that winners are paired with a working/published writer to work with as a mentor. I have no idea how this happens and I don’t know yet who I've been paired with—but it feels like the kind of thing that could, if I wanted it to, change everything.

It’s strange. I’ve always hedged any discussion of my writing with qualifiers: “I like to write, but I don’t know if I’m a writer.” But I feel like, if I’m to make the most of the resources this prize will offer me, I have to give up my shyness about the whole thing. Not only do I have to take ownership of my being a writer but I have to give time to writing. Serious time. When I can fully comprehend it, it’s exciting. I finally have permission to surrender myself to words, to creating. This is the thing I love the most and suddenly I don’t have to be scared to admit that I want to give it everything.

I know external permission was never necessary, but I don’t know what it would have taken for me to give it to myself.

I have it now, either way. I don't know what will become of this but there's no way it can't be good. 

h.

I wait all day for the evening. The sun goes down and the world quiets itself and my heart quiets, too.  I write for hours sometimes. I read. I take walks. Yesterday I completed my grad school applications—I’d been waiting on a reference from one of my professors and, at the last minute, he came through. Today I’m feeling the release of a huge responsibility. Tonight I skipped a class in favor of reading for fun. (Sometimes a small thrill is enough.) I’m not ready to worry about the waiting that comes next. Something will happen and when it does, I’ll be ready. For now I just want to enjoy knowing that my work is done. 

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But these days something is always bringing me to my knees. I have given myself to feeling fully—to letting every wave of everything hit me with all its force. I have forever willed my heart to be gentler, not in the way it feels for things (because I am not sorry for fearing or grieving or loving fiercely) but in the way these things become a part of me, the way they live inside my bones and wake me up at night. Sometimes I wonder how much my body and my mind can hold. But they hold. So I will fill them.

I‘ve been reading Plato’s Cratylus for an etymology paper. I am still so far in over my head, but it is good exercise for my brain and my room is quiet and there's fresh air coming in from the open window and outside the city and the sky have blended and at the right angle I am suspended in stars. 

This peace will have left me by morning, but I’ll embrace it while it’s here.

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Alfred Eisenstaedt - The Parisians

My bedroom is an ever-growing fortress of books. I can’t help it. I find security in them, somehow—in the weight of them, in the feeling of their pages between my fingers, in the way they stack atop one another so neatly, like bricks or building blocks or things meant to be together, things meant to become something bigger. I am comforted by all that they contain—by the existence of ideas given like gifts. Books are brave. My desk is piled with them, and my floor is piled with them, my bookshelf is full and I am always hungry.

Every so often, I come across a writer whose words bring me to my knees. Karen Connelly's One Room in a Castle is a series of short essays, written as if they were letters. They are remarkable in the way that they capture the fullness of the smallest moments. Her prose has a precision and a weight and a momentum that often makes my throat catch. 

I don’t know what it is. Writing does this to me. A just-right string of words and I’m struck dumb, clutching my heart. 

"Sometimes I feel as if I weigh a thousand tonnes with my words and my nightmares and my camera eyes and my memory. How can our minds weigh so much when our skulls are so small? My skin barely contains my life."

-Karen Connelly, One Room in a Castle 

I don't have more to say than that. It's worth reading, if you want to read it.

I just wanted to document its existence in my world. 

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My glasses do not look like this at all.
(Image via Tongue in Chic.)

This afternoon I ordered new glasses. I'd wanted new frames for a while--I started looking in the summer but wasn't quite sure what I was looking for, so I eventually gave it a rest. But for the last month, I've been telling myself that I'm finally going to get a new pair, and today I found them. They're quite unlike anything I've ever worn before--and, honestly, aren't at all the kind of thing I thought I wanted--but I like them. A lot. They're dark brown tortoiseshell browline frames, and they're a little bit serious and a little bit feminine and if I were ever somehow transported to the 1950’s, I’d fit right in.

They should be ready in a few days. I'm looking forward to looking a little bit different. 

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From a 1938 National Geographic

In the morning I bolt upright because I fear I've slept through the beginning of my shift at the library. In fact, I don't have to be there for another two hours. I leave my room and the kitchen is a mess. We are suddenly an apartment of girls too sad to do the dishes. 

I make coffee and get in the shower. I dry my hair and turn my music up. I make hard boiled eggs. I don't like the taste of them, but I find the whole process of eating them too pretty to pass up--the bowl full of fragments of egg shell, the soft, yellow middles surrounded by glassy white. 

I've been having a lot of long talks with my best friend. This past year has made me harder, somehow. Kate says I can be difficult to approach, and she's right. My internal rages sometimes cause me to seal myself to the entire outside world. I can feel it, this thing that bares its teeth at any question of my competence, any outward suspicion that something is not right or that I cannot handle it. She says I'm unaware of the number of people I intimidate. The picture of myself that I hold in my mind is one of absolute weakness. I do not know how these two things connect to one another--how one becomes the other--but they do. 

Sometimes. 

h.

Everything I have to say is the same as everything I've said before. I'm getting things done, and I'm tired. 

The panic always builds around 10:00. It doesn't matter how much I've accomplished, but when it comes time to start thinking about sleep, my heart starts to race. The feeling isn't gone by morning, but I'm sleepier, slower. 

I know this isn't interesting -but I can't think too far outside of it because I'm scared I'll lose sight of something and somehow make everything fall to pieces. I'd rather worry about this overwhelming but ultimately manageable thing (finish the applications, do them well, get them in) than whatever's waiting just outside.

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