You find it difficult to come back to the year that was. Slumped on your bed, knitted wool blanket covering your legs, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning unit and the loop of Explosions In The Sky’s Your Hand In Mine, which you set on repeat, you start the initial draft with “I”. Three minutes later, you stop. You highlight everything. Delete. You start again.
And wasn’t that the point of this year for you? Starting again.
Not from scratch (because haven’t your hands gathered so much? Leaves, dust, pencil shavings, eraser shards, ink, salt water, wounds, et al.) and definitely not from ashes. You minimize the document. Copy/paste.
Now, Dean Young (whose voice you’ve never heard) is talking. “Each morning we wake with the obligatory liberty to conceptually recreate the world. We fail. There’s some leftover energy from the first bang still causing trouble. We despair. We try again.”
For a moment a thought (looming deadlines and that unsent email, the boy you’ve been meaning to talk to, the time you’re supposed to wake up in the morning, how much money you’ve spent for the holidays) occupies your mind. The song is now at 1:28. You think of how many times you’ve had to stay up beyond that time for the year that was. More than you could count (then again, you were never that good with math). You think of the two coffee shops you frequented for a time, and how long you stayed in each of them, filling your mind with facts and facts and facts and names (a disease’s, rarely a person’s) enough to equip you for the past few exam weeks’ multiple choice mazes (where you’ve dealt with “all of the above”, “A and B only”, and “A, B, and C only” with the same stoic look, pushing your glasses closer to your face as if you read the questions and choices wrong the first time, as if it’s another question). You tell yourself you should be thankful you’re passing, thinking of the friends who are doing worse, but the thought only comforts you (wrongly, even) halfway. You think you could do better, with enough dedication.
But you know inside its really about how much you’re willing to give up.
/
You think of how much really is at stake. Writing, for one. If one thing occupied this year most, it was writing. You try to remember how it felt, when you first got published and whom you told about. Only a vague memory surfaces. It was a piece you spent an hour or so drafting the first three pages, while talking to a friend over the internet, following your then-professor’s suggestion (“If you’re going to make it short, keep it really short. And if you’re going to make it long, make it really long.”), ignoring the impending deadline for the animal physiology class presentation due the next day. Some workshops and roughly fourteen revisions later, the piece makes its way to publication. You feel like a writer, yes. But only for a moment. Enter thoughts of Low Self Esteem, Infinite Sadnesses, School Deadlines, et al. But you keep working anyway. Work is the cheapest drug you’re willing to purchase. You make it to the longest and oldest writing workshop in the country and for a few days you think this is The Best Thing Ever. Enter the actual workshop. Enter meeting new people, getting pieces (of your pieces and maybe even you) ground to smithereens but you take it all in anyway. You tell yourself it’s for the best. Months later, you conclude how this is decidedly so. For the best. You try to remember the water (how it softly crashed against your legs while you were looking out into the dark sea in some distant beach on one of those nights, not sure of what you’re trying to find, not sure if you can even see anything), you try to recount the conversations but end up recounting more the things you drank and smoked. You wonder how your mother would react if she found out you smoked now, occasionally. You think of ghosts and if there really were any of them sitting in during the workshop. You think of the wasps that gathered on your doorstep (dead, enough to fill a bowl- lots of bowls) there every morning for almost two straight weeks. You think of that grey-brown dog who kept visiting, who hung around long enough to get his head patted by everyone and anyone. You think of the cows and the sunsets. (What Seemed To Be) The Longest Jeepney/Bus Rides Ever. Jumping off a cliff. Jumping off a boat. That scar (you keep forgetting to fix). Reading poems. Not reading poems. Zooming around the open field like an airplane. Listening to people speak in a dialect you couldn’t comprehend. You think of lessons in kindness and silence. You think of Edith and her words, how they struck something inside you then and how they stuck- how you later found out you were lucky: the last batch of fellows to have been with her. Something stirs. You think of folding paper (cranes, the only thing you could even create from origami). You think of the water again. You think of all the books you’ve borrowed and lent away from your co-fellows-turned-critics-turned-friends-turned-occasional-drinking-buddies-turned-walking-talking-advice-columns. Inside, words seem to swell from your bones but they don’t quite make sense yet. You think of getting better. How much you’ve read. How much you’ve yet to read.
/
You think of the date (December 30, 1:25 AM) and in just a few more days school will resume. You wonder how the rest of second year will pan out for you. You pray you’ll pass the last few slews of tests. You ask the universe for more sleep (because really, that’s what you need the most). You think about your classmates: how this year it was mostly about knowing each other better (some people proving you wrong on what you initially thought of them, others showing what they’re really made of). You can’t help placing them in different circles – circles you’ll never want to touch, circles you keep closest to you, circles within circles within circles. You think of that one professor who frightens you a lot- the one who said she didn’t like your group on the first meeting, the one who told her patient “You have to let go.” You think of everything you have to learn versus everything you have to memorize. You think again of your classmates: the ones you look forward to vis-à-vis the ones you need to learn to tolerate, or regard as invisible. You think of which classmates you pay the most attention to. You ask why. Conclusion: fascination/boredom. You think of the things you did this year, which were driven by boredom.
/
You wonder why you’ve been drawing lesser and less. A gape presents itself and you swear to produce more art in the next year.
/
You find it funny you’ve been spending time with your family more this year, as if to make up for time you will soon lose to your chosen (soon-to-be) profession. You try to remember the sound of your friends’ voices- commanding them to echo from the walls of your home, but only the same song plays in your ears. 7:31.
/
You think of The End of The World. Even if it’s hopefully/likely untrue, the idea frightens a part of you. You have plans (tucked somewhere- inside a book, in one pocket, in a small sock) for the future. You hope for a better year soon because this one was great. You think of a line you had recently read: “Sure, everything’s ending,”
“but not yet.”
