STOP

Get Out of My Life

1. I would sell my soul for clear skin.

2. The meaning of life is having glasses ugly enough to make you look pretty.
3. I don't really feel like being a person, yet here we are.

***

Maybe if I

were instead

a baby bird,

you wouldn't always

have to come up

with excuses

for holding me,

soft and tender

in your hands.

Maybe if I

were instead

a baby bird,

I wouldn't always

have to come up

with excuses

for not flying away

from here.

***

Some days in this life, you are the tracks that lead off to some mysterious and wonderful distance. Some days you are the train, strong and filled with purpose and fire and the promise of a destination. Some days, my friends, you will be the coins and on those days, when the weight of the world is about to run you over and the tracks feel like they are frozen and silent, just remember…soon, someone will run to the tracks, ignore the distance they lead to, forget the sound of the train that passed, and search frantically for your transformed self, shining and smooth. They will pick you up, they will hold you forever and when age catches up to them, it won’t be the train or the tracks they will remember, it will be you, the coin.
***

Please
grab hold
of my neck
and whisper
sternly
into my ear
that you did not forget
to remember
me.
You did not forget
the way I warm you up,
the pace
of our love.
The way my heart is tender
or how hard you laugh?
The way I smell
or how my arms
hold you
like they were made
out of the empty space
that surrounds
you?

***

I stayed there, alone, waiting for the sound of your legs in the long grass. I waited there, quiet, watching for a glimpse of your hair in the wind. I am there still, tired, believing you will find me.
***

***

In other news, Tyler Knott Gregson is a bro. My life is a mess. There is something fundamentally wrong with people who enjoy socializing. I literally don't want to be anything. The absence of something is where I'm sort of at right now, which is, ya know, awesome.

"Bleeding-Heart Liberal"

We all had a case of the post-Thanksgiving lazies, so my mother was scrolling through Netflix, trying to pick a movie for us all to watch. I somehow convinced her we should watch Hotel Rwanda. In the middle, my father kept pestering me. Asking if I wanted to go hunting with him, if I wanted a gun for Christmas; he did this repeatedly and in spite of my obvious discomfort with the subject. My mom said, about the movie, "It's almost like Hitler and the Jews in Germany."

"Mom," I was a little incredulous. "It was a genocide." 

Somehow, the subject changed and we were talking about planes. The Thanksgiving before I turned five, my dad and I flew to Utah and skied for a few days. On the way there, we were walking through security when my father saw someone we knew. Mr. Napoli is my friend Gaetano's father. (His family's just a little bit Italian.) His fat cheeks jiggled as he and my father joked for a few moments. I knew Mr. Napoli worked at the airport, but I didn't really understand what his job was. He had on a white button-up, black dress pants, and he had a long, black object in his hand as he leaned against the metal arches that sometimes beeped and sometimes didn't. He patted me on the head with meaty hands as my father asked him, "Do you ever, ya know, profile the people who walk through security?"

Mr. Napoli, blond mustache wiggling and balding brow sweating, laughed and said, "Of course."

My father laughed with him and said, in the airport, and then again, standing in the middle of the living room over ten years later, "A little profiling never hurt anybody."

I don't have a lot of words, but none of the ones I have are very nice and I think I just need to go to bed.

“Atticus—-" …said Jem bleakly. "How could they do it, how could they?"
“I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

"Scars and Stripes" Source

"Today I am heartbroken.
Today I am angry.
I’m at a loss for words, so let this speak for its self.
Scars and Stripes, -Acrylic and ink on paper. 

"A lot of people have asked me if it’s ok for them to share this on their site or social media, and to all who have I thank you.
But I’ve left this unsigned and un-watermarked for a reason.
I don’t care much for the credit, all I care about is getting this out there.
It’s not about me, it’s not about promoting my art, and it’s not just about Mike Brown. This piece is about all those right now who are being persecuted by the state for their color. This is for every unwarranted traffic stop, every beating by an officer, every black child who is afraid to walk home from school, not from bullies, or pedophiles, or muggers, but scared to death by the very people who swore an oath to serve and protect them.
It’s not my image,
it’s theirs."

Little Girls on Skis

"Hold on," I said. "Just let me get ready." 

I moved to leave Liezl's room. I turned the doorknob and opened the door. As I was about to pass through the door and into the hallway, Liezl called me.

"Sam?"

I turned around. "Yeah?"

"Sometimes--some days, I feel like I'm in Colorado. Do you know what I mean? Does that make any sense?"

I leaned on the door jamb for support, fighting the urge to rest my head on it. "Yeah. No. Yeah. That makes sense. I know what you mean. I-I get you."

***

My mom called me about a week ago. "Dad wants to ski with you this weekend."

"What day?"

"Oh." She sounded surprised at my quickly implied agreement. "Saturday."

"Okay."

On Friday, I drove to Killington, took my pass picture, and drove home to wait for my parents.

On Saturday morning, my dad and I took the gondola to the top and began the cycle of the most ridiculously repetitive recreational sport I've ever had the opportunity and misfortune to partake in. 

On one of our first runs, we were standing in line, waiting to alternate with a group from the line next to us. To our left, a little girl was leaning on her poles and looking up to say something to a man, presumably her father. She pushed herself forward with little red mittens wrapped clumsily around the grips of her poles. My father took his left pole and pressed it across my shins, as if I was going to cut the father-daughter duo in front of us. I watched her; she stopped herself on the plastic line that said, "STOP STOP STOP," handed her father her poles, and took his hand as she shuffled and slid herself to the line that said, "LOAD HERE LOAD HERE LOAD HERE." He lifted her onto the chair when it swung around. Her skis whacked against each other and her little body bounced as the chair bumped over the first few wheels on the chairlift line.

Wearing skis is half standing and half sliding, but there were so many people on the first day Killington was open from the top to the bottom, there wasn't a lot of room for the "sliding" aspect of skiing. Between runs, I froze on the chairlift without my neckie or an actual jacket; my father teased me that I can't live in Vermont if I was going to be cold, joking I'd have to turn in my license for a Massachusetts one. I told him I wasn't complaining about the cold and therefore couldn't be scolded. I almost told him what I actually thought. I wanted to ask him if bravery was the absence of fear or just the overcoming of it, and if it was the latter, was I even cold if I didn't complain about it? But my father didn't want to hear any of that, so I put the tops of my poles in my armpits, slid my fingers from their individual sections of my gloves to keep them, observed the snow underneath my skis, and didn't say anything.

Lovely Girl, Won't You Stay?/ Daughters of Anarchy/ The Popcorn Movie Squad/ Snow Football/ Catholic Girls Start Much Too Late

I know I'm usually bad at titles, but, for some reason, I have about 7 billion today. I'd say, "I'm sorry," if I actually cared.

***

Sammy is the name of a girl who lives next door to me. She has borderline brown hair and a desk drawer devoted to (barely) containing all the movies she brought to school. Her face is open and her jokes are always ridiculous. She had a brief stint as an anarchist and continues to hope for at least a period of her life to be spent in a Thoreauvian way. During one of the first weeks of school she decided the flirtatious boys on campus were, "on poon patrol." When I barged into her room, hyperventilating and holding a twenty-two page essay that was only supposed to be ten pages, she offered to read my essay and told me I could lay in her bed and read in the meantime. She sometimes comes to my room and sits on my bed to do homework or just talk. She's a worthwhile human being with a healthy appreciation for the word "allegory" and Billy Joel.

My roommate, Amy, is a political science major and a self-proclaimed "Democratic Socialist." I was teasing her when I said, "Pfft. Yeah okay, communist." But the joke caught on with some of the other girls and Sammy now leads a brigade of anarchists, which makes Amy flustered, if not angry. When we, meaning Olivia, Amy, Sammy, and I, watched Into The Wild, Sammy remarked constantly that what Chris McCandless was, is what she wanted to be. The end of society is Sammy's dream, despite understanding the contradiction of sharing this with other people.

We have some obsession with teasing Amy about politics, probably because she's so easy to get a rise out of. But. We may take it too far sometimes. Sammy calls us the "Daughters of Anarchy" and I don't really know what I've gotten myself into.

Anyway, Sammy and Lexi have helped remind me I am aspiring to be something, not a person who cannot overcome the blackhole of her own bed. Sammy does so on a regular basis but when I told Lexi how upset I was she said, "well I haven't invented my time machine yet, and even if I did it's going to take some time to finalize the rules so stop worrying about other people."

With the girls, and sometimes Shae, I watch movies and we call ourselves the Popcorn Movie Squad, which shortens, to my chagrin, to "PMS." We've also become a makeshift book club; we're reading Fahrenheit 451 over Thanksgiving break.

On Wednesday, I was delighted by the planes in the sky and when Nick fell asleep in Linguistics. I was in my room later that day and I heard Stubborn Love by The Lumineers coming through the thin wall. Then I heard Sammy singing and ran to her room. I flung her door open, "I love this song!"
Her head whipped around; a smile that could've broken her face erupted. It was a moment of cliched jumping around and singing along with a song, while taking breaks to comment on the music video and the quality of the album to which the song belonged. It was good. 

I keep saying, "You're good," "You guys are good," or "That was good." I think I'm doing this because other words don't cover it, but I don't want to over estimate and then get hit by a figurative truck.

On Thursday, I felt the same urge to crawl into my bed and never emerge settling in, but then Sammy wrote an essay while sitting on my bed and I edited people's essays at my desk. Liezl and Emma both found their way into my room and asked if we wanted to go play in the snow. I put on my Sorels and Sammy put on her Hunters. We caught snowflakes in our mouths for a bit and then Sammy asked if I wanted to go for a run around the building. On the quad, we threw snow mixed with leaves at each other until we became captivated by the silence that snow creates. Liezl screaming our shared name called us back to the front of the dorm.

As we were coming inside, Mike, Patrick, and Alex, boys we know from class and from the first couple weeks of school, told us they were going out to play football in the snow. After a brief moment of deliberation, I run to the fourth floor, put on my sneakers and a long sleeve shirt, and threw around a freezing, soaking wet football with some of the only honors boys in my dorm. They started calling my Sammy Watkins, who I assumed was a football player. Then Liezl and Emma came back outside. Liezl "went long," Patrick threw the ball to her, she made some kind miraculous catch and ran toward an imaginary endzone. I chased her and Mike chased me, blocking me as we ran, slipping, sliding, half-falling on the cold, wet grass. Laughing hard enough to make my stomach hurt, I remembered and quickly dismissed the funk I'd been in a few hours before. 

Even though a wise friend called these sorts of instances, "simply dreams," stating "they aren't symbolic of real life, they aren't symbolic of success, and they aren't symbolic of anything real," I'd like to call them distractions, because I'm constantly procrastinating or avoiding something, so why shouldn't I do the same thing with sadness?

(These are just a representation of a multitude of instances and those who aren't mentioned by name have still played a role in the past week. I just can't write them all down the way I want to.)

***

Anyway, on to poetry.

"First Snow" (Haylee told me she loved this poem. My mom said, "Nice," so I'm posting it without letting Lexi read it 

Swallowed

Wholly by the night

Partially by the snow

The flakes blotted out the stars.

Out of love,

The stars gathered light

Behind each flake

In an embrace

Of galactic proportions

We stood:

The ground

too soft

to crunch

underneath our feet

A world of brightness,

A vacuum of existence

Of what seemed

To be the truest things

We swam through

A breathtaking quiet

To silence

all other quiets

Indomitable as we felt

Our ineptitude

Lurched us out of the trance

Created by our fragile breaths

Becoming fog as they

Rolled against

the night

Our names

(Yelled from a different land of existence)

were the cacophony

that shattered our stillness

My breath hitched

I felt something retreat

Leaving the souls

diving from the heavens

As flakes,

We joined

the voice

waiting for us

on the steps

"Things"

Rummaging through a box of old

Things

And restraining the emotions

That follow

Nostalgia

Regret

Guilt

I understand the lack

Of reciprocation

Of emotion

From the

things

I give gravity

Things do not feel time

The things that

(in my mind)

belong to a time of

“before”

do not know

what came

and they do not know

“after”

They know nothing

Except the weight

Of their own fibers and

The inside of a closet

I wish I could ask if

They wish for sentience the way

I wish for ignorance

***

MUSIC YO

"Lovely girl, won't you stay?

won't you stay, stay with me?

All my life, I was blind

I was blind, now I see"

"Your mother told you all that I could give you was a reputation

She never cared for me

Did she ever say a prayer for me?

Come out come out come out

Virginia don't let me wait

Catholic girls start much too late"

Alright. Listen up, friends. I'm begging you to watch this video and laugh at the media with me and love Taylor Swift for giving them a most deserved middle finger and making an enjoyable song.

***

Okay. You've made it this far. I'm warning you, "onslaught" does not do justice to the amount of pictures I have. And in no particular order:

hey liz

That's Christy

Olivia and I on some Saturday

We like to crash selfies

Liezl and Sammi. Oh hey Emma...

That's Sammy by the way

SHAE: MY DAY ONE BAE

She's beauty, she's grace. She's a democratic socialist.

Oh, yeah. These are my friends.

Because three people can sleep comfortably in a twin bed.

Becca-boo

Sam, me, Amanda, Olivia

This is my friend Abby from CCYWC

This is a very important picture. Thank you.

We took a test to compare how liberal we all are.

Liv and I during Into the Wild

Get it? Because the Sams are on opposite ends?

Nichole being a creeper

Hey Sammy

Nichole. Please.

Amy, Sammy, and I

I was going on and on about free range buffalo and then I made them pose for a picture

Sammy's fave selfie face

Not true. We totally love him.

What my friends don't know is that they are good and I need them.

***

Other than that, I'm so so sorry.