Sunday, January 16, 2011

January 14, 2010

I woke up this morning and looked at myself in the mirror and thought, “A good way to start a poem would be with, 'I am a battlefield.'” I thought about all the literary implications and laughed at my bedhead, standing straight up in the back, the uneven skin on my chin, and the bags under my eyes. It was my morning, and I was thinking about hipster poems in a bright blue shirt.

I am working on an essay and I have this line to finish. “Film, writing, and music have always been interests of mine, yet they did not merge for me until this recent year, when...” The answer is really boring and I'm much more interested in the feeling of my elbow and my wrists against the laptop and the itch on my forehead and the snow outside, because all I can think of to write is not at all remotely true. “When I was hit by a bus.”

Now, that is a college application essay that'd be interesting.

I get hung up again and my toes play with my headphone cord. I think about how intolerable it is to miss people, but how I'm getting better at it and I don't know why. Maybe because I keep dreaming of them. I pause in that thought long enough to have a relationship with the light touching my white electric guitar and the blanket with felt sheep my mother made me when I was five.

I write this sentence, “Alongside my development as a creative person, I have of course developed socially as well, and the lens through which my artistic talents became clarified is community,” and wonder if my mother the english professor will think it's cool enough. I pause to think about what I really mean, I pause to savor how connected I feel to words and space and light and music and the carpet under my foot and my elbow resting on my other, crossed leg.

January is disappearing.