I’m grabbing that lamp I got from my grandma’s house when she died, the green lamp with weird, white age spots around the base. I can’t fit the fucking thing in my arms while also grabbing my suitcase, my toaster, that stupid looking and ridiculously heavy paperweight my dad got me for Christmas last year.

Just because you suck at gift giving doesn’t mean paper is going to grow legs and run away, dad. Paper will stay in place with as little as a pencil, so why am I hauling this piece of shit with me, why not let the bank, or the government, or the rats deal with it? Because it might be a piece of shit, but it’s my piece of shit, and they can’t take that away.

I could just make more than one trip but when you’re pissed, time is of the essence and second looks make you even more furious. 

While I’m balancing these pieces of shit on my legs, trying to open my car door, the paper wait slams into my damn toe, which is dressed in nothing but the rubber band of my flip flop. 

Despite the anger welling deep inside me I do not scream out the F - word. Some part of me that’s still human knows the neighborhood kids should not witness this melt down. Somewhere inside of me I know it’s better to go out quietly.

I let most of the things fall to the ground. The human part of me sinks down next to them. The beast in me is screaming “FUCK” at the top of his lunges. The human is on the ground, letting silent tears roll down his cheeks, holding his toe, holding his pieces of shit, desperately trying to hold his home, which is empty except for the dead skin under the bed, the smears on the mirror, the marks on the wall from when he moved the furniture. It’s not his anymore, just an emblem of his human failures. Just a symbol of what he tried. The paper weight, in all it’s stupid glory looks up at the human like he’s an idiot and he knows it. 

“Like one who has traveled distant oceans, am I among those who are forever at home.” Rainer Maria Rilke, German, born December 4, 1875, Prague, Czechia. Death: December 29, 1926. Wrote The Loner (of which that line above is present) in French, along with a series of other poems referred to as “The Roses.”

“Why do you know this, why do you care?” He asks me through the photo on his wikipedia article. His fuzzy, frowning mustache, slicked back hair, piercing eyes, staring at me from behind the layers of age. Face squished against the pillow, I must look like a guppy to this lovely, dead poet.

“I don’t know, I don’t care, I guess.” I whisper, answering his rhetorics.

I flick off the phone and turn onto my back. Eyes have not adjusted to the black and so for now I am a part of nothing.

“Am I among those who are forever at home.” Not a question but a statement.

I am, but uncertainty lay in my phrasing. I am, but how long is “forever,” and what is a home? It’s been so long since the palpable feeling of worn, recognizable carpet has poked between my toes. Friendly carpet, or familiar bedsheets, or grass that’s just been mowed by a father.

Suddenly the room is awakening in the low sun. Staring, not into the nothingness of black, but the melancholy grey of morning, which always makes me more depressed. A picture of them and their kids is perched on the bedside table like a bird waiting to start it’s song of rejoice. I wait for it to sing, but I’m only met with Stacy’s now more deeply cut laugh lines and crow's feet, the ones that used to rule her face like faint whispers of the future. She’s very pretty, boys always thought so too. She was invited out far more than I was that semester of college. Now she’s settled down amongst the other houses of suburbia, and I am here too, among them like the property with uncut hedges and damaged siding that the neighborhood has collectively decided to despise. But there is no need to worry--instead of slapping on a new set of paint--it’ll get bulldozed, a forgotten dirt patch with exposed plumbing.

I hear the clatter of the morning down the hallway and wait until the children’s voices have disappeared into the summer before putting on my only set of clean clothes, making the guest room bed, straightening whatever I might’ve messed up and heading out into the bright, bright world, which makes me the most depressed.

“Morning, Amber.” Says Stacy, who’s cleaning off the kitchen table.

“Good morning.”

“How’d you sleep?”

“Really well, thank you.” Lies.

“What’re you hungry for? I made extra pancakes but I also have eggs and bacon I can whip up.”

“Pancakes sound great, thank you.” I sit down at the freshly wiped table and when Stacy, my first and only college roommate, my once best friend, my pal, serves me blueberry pancakes and pours me a glass of almond milk because I’m lactose intolerant, I feel like a child, a baby. The stoic presence of her husband ignoring me while he watches TV in the other room only adds to the nostalgic aloofness of my father in childhood.

She sits down in the chair next to me with her coffee cup. She sips while I eat.

“Hey,” I say, “remember that German poet we studied in Lit class?”

“Sort of, remind me.”

“Rainer Maria Rilke.”

“Oh, that sounds familiar. He wrote all those poems in French, didn’t he?”

“He did.” I say, and lean back in my chair, full, “The Roses.” I almost whisper.

She shakes her head and sips again.

“‘The things I brought back with me seem strange here and out of place. In their own land they moved like animals, but here they hold their breath in shame.’” I recite.

“Hm?”

“It’s Rilke.”

“Oh. You know you always did love Lit class.” she says, “why didn’t you continue?”

The question insults me, but how offended can you really allow yourself to become when you’re sitting at someone’s kitchen table, eating their food, having slept in their guest room the night before? The presence of these gifts humbles me.

The presence of her, her home, my alternative, my future, my past. I look around at the walls, the decor, her face, still pretty, the sound of the Price is Right, bleeding from the living room, the resentment we all feel.

“I don’t know,” I answer, the most honest reason I had ever offered for that particular question. I’m usually on the defense because of my parents accusing tone.

She shakes her head again and sips.

How I’ve embodied it. How it’s been fed by the constant temptation of consumerism, of the ideas, of motivation and the spurts of productivity, and then when I cool, when I slow, everyone still seems to be asking questions of “how.” And me? I’m still stuck on the “why.” Why bother? Didn’t you get sick of working hard for nothing all that time? I want to ask, but I don’t. I just listen to the theme song that embodies colorful objects rotating on a screen in front of her husband. Her kindness that I’ve taken advantage of. Her home. Her blueberry pancakes. It is not mine.

“Well you can stay here until you get your feet back on the ground.”

“That’s fine, thank you, this is all I needed.” And just like that I’m up, standing at the front door, staring at the--not in use--laugh lines on her face. “Thank you again, Stacy.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay longer?” She does not get up from her seat, I take this as a sign of relief that I’ve decided to go.

I turn the knob and smile, “I’m sure.”

“Goodbye, Stacy.”

“Goodbye, Amber.”

With all my things I drive down Stacy’s street, let the sun warm the car.

Rilke sits next to me, slicked back hair, mustache, he looks ridiculous in my car, this lovely, dead poet. “The crowded days are spread across their tables, but to me the far-off holds more life.” He recites, watching the kids play soccer across lawns.

“Behind my face stretches a world, no more lived in, perhaps, than the moon. But the others leave no feeling alone, and all their words are inhabited.”

And as we drive through the world, two Loners since birth, I silently ponder if “I am among those who are forever at home.”

A poem about me....

I am more than my thoughts that pop like bubble wrap,

Chewing gum,

and jaws, coerced to align with beauty,

Fifth grade science project I never did

and sunday school lessons,

Mentos and diet Coke in the church parking lot

Is an example of god's love,

How it bleeds into the cracks of hot concrete

Down our legs at the dinner table

“This is why we don’t drink soda”

because it rots your teeth,

Like the pictures mounted on dentists walls

That would haunt my brother and I’s dreams

It molds your mind like the television

In the hospital corners

And late night projections that danced across my attending face

My decaying brain is patched by ducktape discussions.

Decaying brain, bandaged in tape measures

and weighed by screens.

“My destiny is my destruction

my god is my stomach”

Habits and thoughts assure a preacher's tongue.

“Broken, that’s how the light gets in.” says the one my father wishes he was.

There are so many I wish to be.

So many souls to reflect,

I’m a one-way mirror with a self on each side.

I am the way the world moves

The French lyrics I do not understand

Growing shadows

And chipped driveways

The hard wheels of skateboards

And the cotton Sunrise.

I am the end of summer that freezes at night

The sound of forgetting

flowers in the windowsill

Bending with the weight of sunlight

I am crying poets

And sinking paint

I am the eruption of vinegar volcanoes

And the blood of fizzing Coke,

Filling these chasms of asphalt

empty and broke

I don’t know, maybe I was never really that hungry anyway.

Jalapeno cheesy bread from that woodfired place on third used to haunt me on nights we’d get drunk in the living room. This was after my going out phase.

“I don’t drink to feel alive anymore, I drink to feel dead.”

“Deep.” As you took a long chug of your watery beer.

And I tried to contemplate the ashe of smokey bread on my taste buds. Anything to take away the bitterness of this nasty, nasty beer. Anything to fill the holes of emotion the alcohol can’t seem to reach. Fill it with the chalky sweetness of my mother’s fondant hands, the carbonation of my grandma’s orange, sodapop pool. The ninety nine cent tomato soup cans I ate in my dorm room, the clamour of being alive, dwelling in the hallway outside, as I stared at the gibberish of my calc homework and the poster above my bed, Sublime 40oz. To Freedom. The way the ripped corners scratched my wall from the air of my open window, and the taste of metallic tomato against my cheeks served to inundate me with unforgivable nostalgia, with pain, longing.

Now the longing returns, but in different forms, and I am hungry, but not for anything I’ve chosen, I never choose right. My cracks of feeling are sealed up and glued together by the meat I requested extra tender, the fluffy cake, the savory shrimp, by the adjectives of flavor. I push my plate away and contemplate how I’ve always been full, until now.

When I enter the basement laundry room the warmth from several running dryers settles over me like summer as a child. The bleach we use on the rags, the humidity from the damp linens fills the room with thoughts of the swimming pool. The plunge that saturates you in blue, and as you lay, drying off on the concrete, everything’s quiet. The wind places your hair across your face. Like a sheet on a clothesline, the wind has the potential to blow you anyway it wants and all the people you love or loved in the past will keep you pinned to the mental souvenirs you have hammered into the ground. These are the thoughts that comfort me when I can think of nothing but dark.

“Morning” mumbles Ashley from the corner, she is filling her bucket with gloves and a bottle of liquid Commat.

“Morning Ashley”

“How are you?” Like someone who is trying to speak English, or a child who is trying to talk, Ashley is difficult to understand. I assume she says a one syllable word for “I’m awake, I’m alive, and I’m here”. I assume she says “good.”

“That’s good. how many units do you have today?” I ask.

Without looking up she pulls her crumbled worksheet from her employee jacket “oh three” she says.

“Not bad.”

When she looks up I can see the bright blue drugstore mascara that is coated on her eyelashes like an oil painting. If she told me she was forty, I’d believe her. If she told me she was twenty one, I’d believe her.

I wait for her to ask me why I’m here.

“How many do you have?” She putters out.

I unfold my worksheet, I have three, but it will only be two if I’m lucky. “Three”

She nods her head and I wait for her to ask me why I’ve chosen this place. I wait for her to beg me to run back to you, to go write down what I know, all the wisdom I’ve obtained in my years. For the chili recipe she had on New Year’s Eve.

She walks to the fridge and places her tupperware of casserole on the bottom shelf, below Juan’s six pack of Diet Coke.

I stand still by my bucket of cleaning supplies and wait for her to ask me what I know, for all my fleeting advice. I wait for her to hug me, to reassure a preacher’s tongue.

“Have a good day.” She says as she creaks open the heavy door and exits, letting in the nine below temperatures with her. What a crummy, generic collection of last words to hear.

There are wooden lockers on the opposite side of the dryers, I take off my boots and feel the cracked concrete below my cold, sock covered feet. I put on my white tennis shoes, they remind me of my grandparents. I place my boots on my backpack in an upper locker and secure it with a deadlock. I trust everyone here, but “it only takes one” as my parents would say. Then I place the key on the counter beside the refrigerator. I wonder who will find it, who will claim my five year old boots as their own when I'm gone.

I yawn quietly to myself and ponder the morning. Who am I? What’s my name? I don’t have one, not really. Are these really the last pair of jeans I’ve decided to wear? I almost cry over the thought and think about the all pink leotard and piano key leggings I tried to wear every day in kindergarten. I think of the blue of Ashley’s mascara, I think of my mother. I think of my last word…“three.”

“Three is the number of artists.” You told me, and now I sit here, it’s not profound, I’m just trying to find all the places where thirds fit together. Paintings on coffee shop walls, my two siblings and I sitting in the backseat of our childhood vulvo. A clover. The trinity. Our two bodies intertwined, our one soul in the middle. The panel of windows at my grandparents cabin, so large they let in the forest. Carly’s cigarette everyday at three o’clock.

“Something to take the edge off” She’d tell me.

Jesus’ death.

I stand up and grab my cleaning bucket, my list says Unit B3 first. This is all the way across the snow blown property. Maybe I’ll finally let the wind blow me wherever it chooses, just for a moment, just for a second, just.

It’s odd, how things have fallen into place. How they fit together like legos. How this has been erected from the ground, several balloons. My tenth birthday party, Tony Mendisco’s sweaty unibrow and the prepubescent facial fuzz that looked up to the sky as he cut the red, white and blue of my mother’s contained breath from their chair stakes.

“Quit it, Tony!” his mother, a fat lady sitting at the pic-nic table, slurping up ribs from her flimsy paper plate.

Sharing a birthday with America has always resonated in a frequency of inconvenience. My dislike of barbeque and neighbors that scattered against the backyard, eating my American flag birthday cake with plastic grins.

“You’re a true patriot aren’t ya, kiddo?”

“Cállate la boca ahí dentro!” A man yells out.

My cell is filled with an empty moan that comes from next door. What they have done finds its way through the cracks of the ceiling and drips onto them, I assume it stings.

The things that I’ve done accumulate in a puddle on the floor. Murky and cryptic in nature. At first this mystery did not frighten me, but as it grows, fills the cell slowly, threatens to suffocate me, I’ve grown afraid of it’s ambiguity. I thought this was a mistake, but as the hours grow longer, I’ve realized it’s not, that I am here for a reason. My body shakes with remembrance, while my mind sits in wake.

As the language of the unknown swims around me, I feel myself forgetting even more words, even more times. The darkness, the coldness of my cell, the Mexican flag hung in the hallway, is in exact opposition to the only memory sitting in my brain. The town park where my father is leaning over a public grill and the small light from the coal glows up his July kissed face, my breath playing over the screams from the other children’s game of tag which I’ve climbed into a tree to hide from. The fireworks will start soon and I like to be alone. Where has this day gone?

These memories find themselves in the spaces of my head that do not hurt, they pound too, but in a different way. The yelling from the guards down the hall frightens me when it approaches suddenly and slams me into the hallway.

“Levántate!” He kicks me. “Levántate!”

Him and another bring me to my feet, I begin to feel all the wounds that have been inflicted on my body and I feel frightened over what I do not remember, how I ache. All I can see in my eye is my parents and their friends and their children’s heads from the tree up above, how they speak in whispers of summer.

The men fling me down the hallway. One man holds a gun to my head while the other puts a sack over my face, I weep behind the veil. How far have I fallen from this tree I was perched in? The fireworks will start soon. Beat in time with my headache.

“Oh cállate y dinos!”

Somehow I understand this, but I do not speak.

“Dinos!”

“Que que?” I say

They grunt and punch me in the stomach, “Ya sabes.”

“Yo no.” and then I do, how I’ve fallen from that tree into my pool of unknown. How it’s cleared. How I remember what I’ve done.

“Si?” And I feel the gun press into my forehead. “Si?”

I know what I need to say, what I have to say, but I love to be alone too much, I love the way they sound when I’m in the trees, I love the way they look through the silhouette of leaves and branches, how they illuminate the sky into day. The only good part about my birthday being the same as America’s, I pretend it’s all for me.

“Si?” and the gun presses in even further.

“S-” and before I can finish the fireworks have cut me off. They’ve popped like buttery popcorn. They’ve lit up the sky just as I used to remember. Looking down I watch the bright eyes of everyone else looking up, they’re beautiful too, truly, they’re free.

“Hello,” my voice comes through the line in one of those fake ways, like the person on the other end could never know me. I have secrets, I don’t have any secrets.

“Hello, may I speak with Jannet?”

“Speaking,” I say. This is what people in movies say.

“Hello, Jannet, how are you?”

I know this woman doesn’t know me. No one uses my legal name unless they’re trying to sell me something. I’m my middle name to most people, Scout. Yes, like from To Kill a Mockingbird, no, I’ve never read it, stop asking. “Fine, how’re you?” The nervousness I felt picking up this unknown number has subsided into the soothing woman’s voice.

“I’m doing well. I’m Nancy Cooglar with USC, in Denver, I see you are interested in attending our college, I’m calling to answer any questions you might have.”

“You know what? I don’t think I have any at the moment, thanks though.” I didn’t remember looking into USC anyway.

“Of course.” she says, “we’d love to have you at our school.” And I can feel her smile traveling over the miles of wire, or satellite, or whatever, right to my ear.

“Thank you,”

“Of course, call me back on this number if you need anything.”

And before we hang up, “why would you like me?”

She hesitates for a moment and I know I’ve cast my line in a pond full of fake fish, but she’s here and I’m listening, and her voice feels good in my ear.

“Well, Jannet” she hesitates, “here, at USC, we’re always looking for the most upstanding students, you’ve clearly proven yourself to be just that.”

A wind up my line to find a shiny, plastic piece of uniform response hanging from my hook. But I’m Jannet to this woman, I am not Scout, the average grade student who pretends not to be overly sensitive. I’m not Scout, who never cleans her room and sits on her couch watching TV on the weekends. I’m not aimless, or pointless, or “lacking a structure” as my dad would put it. I’m not Scout, who’s going to community college down the road next fall despite my parents' sighs. I’m Jannet, I’m upstanding, valuable, and I mean something to this woman.

“Really?”

“Of course,” she says, “again, if you need any questions answered, I’m happy to help.”

“Could you tell me about the campus?”

“What would you like to know?”

I think, “what does it look like?”

She laughs a bit, “well, we have a website with full access to photos of the building, if you give me your email I can send you the link.”

“Big library?” I say.

“Yes, we have a large library, with so many valuable resources. Our librarians are top notch.”

“Is the food any good?”

She laughs, “I eat it every day, and I bring my kids to enjoy.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she says, “and you know how picky kids are, but they love it.”

I nod to myself, and slowly the academic buildings, the large ceilinged cafeteria, the long library, old professors standing in front of white boards, small dorm rooms, loud with the age of college, sketch themselves onto my brain. But along with this thrill comes the enormity of the slanting classrooms, the guilt that will eat me alive when I get my grades, the expense of the vast campus, yellow in the fall, the judging eyes of my unknown roommate. Suddenly I’m back in the cloistered restriction of my room with the phone pressed against my ear.

“Anything else I can help you with, Jannet? Would you like to give me your email so I can send you that link?”

“Scout,” I say.

“Pardan?”

“I go by Scout.”

We’re so uniform. So obsessed with lines, with symmetry, with perfection. I often wonder if the gods meant it to be this way. If when they placed the particles of an atom together they knew it would grow into the square lines of property, mowed in straight, differing greens. “This one’s mine, this one’s yours.” It’s ambiguous, and then it isn’t, and then it is again when I ascend further into the black of the universe. Suddenly the symmetry is gone, blurred into the white and green and blue of that little marble. The rules, the regulations, the science that has always strapped me to the floor of the earth like a seatbelt has dissolved into nothing. Nothing but the arbitrary life of what I thought I was existing for.

I’m leaving. I’m going to ask the gods if they really knew what they were doing when they introduced a proton to a neutron, if they can break down all the parts of a cell, if they can explain to me this disaster, this masterpiece. Even if they did, I doubt I’d understand. Maybe they just threw everything into a giant croc-pot like my mother’s chilli recipe. Always hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

I want to sit at the dinner table and ask if it turned out how they thought it would. If the January wind that blow by frosty windows was part of the plan. If the smell of wet sidewalks, stamped with the paws of stray dogs and wandering children was in the divine. I want to ask if it looks, if it smells, if it tastes the way they thought it would. If it was worth all the trouble. This beautiful disaster, this horrible masterpiece.

(A poem inspired by Emily Webb’s last monologue in the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder)

Standing inside my childhood,

it’s different than earlier

How the cows are planted along the turning green fields

like raisins on salad.

“Oh, earth, you’re far too wonderful for anyone to realize you.”

Oh, line of light that takes a seat between the blue of Colorado

and the summer’s green.

Oh, small world of my childhood, how I’ve forgotten.

I fold up oxygen, fill pockets with handfuls of air,

for the hush and the hurry

Swallowed by the contrast,

by the opposite of Here.

And when I’ve dissolved into the world, I’ll discover:

last pages, and last lines, and last words,

they count for something.

“I should have listened.”

Creaking around the couch,

the afternoon light and I spy on you.

Your breath presses against cushion,

your soft snores settle against room, and I listen.

I finally listen.