I’ll say I’m a syllabus-maker, a schedule-creator, a student who fears the coming term, a writer who hasn’t written in two weeks.
Busy. The very word cuts me in half some days.
These past eight years, my life has been measured out in semesters. I go, go, go and know that I’m working toward living. Eventually, I’ll teach full-time, publish more, buy a house, settle in and live somewhere. Really live.
I see a horse (yes, I still want a pony), a porch (of course it wraps around the whole house), fields that rush up to the edge of a mountain range.
Recently, a friend said that she would "destroy the universe if she slept more than 8 hours a night or spent more than 2 hours eating each day." Another said she "would call more" if she wasn't "so exhausted by the end of each day."
This is the now, when I'm waiting for my life to start. Lately, I keep thinking that to live means to be less busy, but I know that’s never going to happen. Not really. Different walls, a different city, even a different me can’t carry the promise of interpreting all of this differently.
Life will go, and I’ll still be staring down that road at my future self who’s really going to be happy. If I could catch up with her, if I do, will I ride that horse, sit on that porch, climb those mountains? None of this is metaphorical.
This is. A poem by John Rybicki (from We Bed Down into Water):
Silhouette
I’m folding clothes when
I notice my boy lying curled
on our street in the rain,
lying there with his hood up.
No cars, just the rain
with its soft bites.
I’m in a rush outside
when Martel begins to
rise, careful-like,
and when he’s all the way up,
he stares at the dry outline
of his body on the blacktop,
his face bowed like he’s
reading something.
His friend Chucky comes
trolling on his bike, skidding
his sneakers on the street.
Martel lifts his chin
and then both boys look
down again, watching
my son disintegrate.
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