Words. Sometimes. Maybe...: 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: