The first day of the Rest of Your Life

            Anthony sighed and looked sideways at his best friend, Chris, who gave him a weak smile that was probably meant to be reassuring. He had come so far to get to this point.  He had sacrificed so much and knew that there would be more to atone for once the day was over. But he just couldn’t bring himself to care about that right now. Because right now, in this moment, he knew that he had to stay strong and focus on the task at hand.

            Without his permission, his mind began to wander back to the events that had led him to this point. Going even further back, he admitted to himself that his life had never been easy but that it seemed to all have led up to this moment. Now. Here. If he succeeded, it would all be worth it. If his plan backfired, then all would be lost and he would never ever recover from the shame and heartache. This moment of anticipation was so bittersweet, not yet knowing whether he would tumble into oblivion or rise from the ashes like the mythical phoenix that he had always so admired.

            This was Anthony’s last moment with his heart before it would officially belong to someone else or be crushed, withered, and useless forever. For Anthony was in love, he was in love like no one had ever been in love before. In all of his nine years on this rotating rock that we call planet earth, Anthony had never felt like he felt right now. Not even on the first night of Chanukah, taking a moment to just look out at the eight gloriously mysterious packages all waiting just for him, did Anthony shake so with the joy of anticipation. Not even the first day of elementary school (big kids roaming the halls and actual assigned homework!) filled him with such worry and suspense. Not even the joy of slowly, oh so slowly, pulling out that wooden block with sweating fingers wondering whether this would be the one to cause the whole tower to fall apart with the humiliating cries of “Jenga” shouting in his ear balanced him so delightfully on the precipice of clear thought and pure chaos.

            Anthony loved his parents and his grandparents. He loved his dog and his Spiderman backpack. He loved the smell of potato pancakes and he supposed he even loved his sister (when she was being nice to him instead of slamming her door in his face.) But nothing, nothing, felt quite like the love that he had in his heart today. It was a love that had started to grow inside him last week when she shared her pudding with him for the first time because he told her that his mom only ever packed him healthy snacks. And it had begun to escalate as she shared that blue was her favorite color too.  But when he heard her argue with Chris about their favorite characters on Avatar, he knew he was a goner for sure.  Her name was Hannah and she was better than last Chanukah and his Birthday combined.

            On Monday, he made funny noises in class so he could get a timeout because he had heard his sister giggling with her friend about how much they loved a guy who “had the whole bad boy thing going on.” Tuesday he complemented her on the height of her pigtails after listening to his mother complain to a friend that Anthony’s father never said anything nice about the way she looked anymore.  Wednesday he gave her all the diamond tangrams because he had seen a movie where a woman said that diamonds were a girl’s best friend.  And Thursday night after soccer practice, he had enlisted Chris, the only one he could trust with such a sensitive matter, to help him in completing his grand gesture.

            For hours, he and Chris had sat in his room to plan and scheme. They pulled together all their possessions to use as bartering tools for the extra help that they would need. Billy had taken two packs of double bubble gum to let them use his pastel chalk. Jimmy had taken Anthony’s Clone Wars comic to keep their teacher Mrs. Smith out of the way.  He even asked Hannah’s best friend, Jenny, to keep her busy so she wouldn’t notice how weird he was being. She agreed to do it for free.

            So that was how he had arrived at this point. During lunch, he had raised his hand to leave and use the bathroom, but instead he had snuck off to get started with the rest of his life. His friends had all given him subtle nods as they filed back into the room after lunch, letting him know that everything was in order and the plan was a Go. As he looked away from Chris and towards Hannah, he took another breath and waited to see if all of his hard work would pay off.

            Mrs. Smith pulled up the hanging map to display the blackboard underneath, just like she always did after lunch to start their math lesson for the day. But this time the equations she had prepared were erased and in their place were words written in bright neon. In the center were the letters “AS LOVES HB.” Around his declaration of love he had written statements and short sentences for her. “Because you share whatever you have.” Was off to the left. “Your hair looks really pretty in the sunlight” was written across the bottom. “One time I was sad because Danny told me I looked stupid, but you said I didn’t look stupid but that Danny was stupid but that stupid wasn’t a very nice word” had taken a long time to write neatly. He admitted that he had never really liked poetry and would probably never be a very good writer. But he watched her eyes grow wide as they darted across his work to take in all the words.

            Mrs. Smith was angry. She was demanding to know who had erased her hard work and she was using her loud voice. They were never allowed go talk that loudly, but adults never had to use their “indoor voices” for some reason. Anthony wasn’t listening to Mrs. Smith at all. And he knew his friends would never tell on him because when he bought their cooperation he had also bought their silence. Anthony didn’t care what Mrs. Smith thought; he only cared about Hannah and what she thought. She hadn’t looked at him yet and he was getting nervous.

Finally, Mrs. Smith said that she would have to redo the math equations so they could go into the reading corner or sit and their desks with a book while she worked.  Anthony held his breath and watched Hannah get up from her chair, grab her book, and turn to look at him. He held his breath and looked up into her eyes, her growth spurt had hit before his but he was determined not to let that bother him. This was it. He didn’t breath again until he saw her face break out into the biggest smile he had ever seen.

             “Finally! I was running out of pudding!”

            He grinned back at her and felt his cheeks flush with happiness and embarrassment. He offered her his arm and invited her to retire to the beanbag in the reading corner with him and when she giggled, he felt it all the way down in his toes. He gave her the good bag that still had all its beans and smiled at her over his copy of “If you Give a Mouse a Cookie.” Years later, they would not remember exactly what he had written on the board, only how happy they both were that he had.

Non Fiction is a stupid way to say This is the Truth

Old home videos show me laughing and dancing
This is how my father still thinks of me
When he worries out loud that I don't understand the real meaning of the financial impact of student loans
When he thinks that I don't truly appreciate the the glory of not paying rent and simply suffocating under the weight of living half in/half out of another family
He sees the freckles that appear amusingly quickly at the mere mention of sunlight and dark curls bouncing just above a tiny waist
He imagines the carefree daughter that tucked a doll into her bed as a child before going to a sleepover party so he would not feel sad at the sight of her empty bed after returning home from a long day of work

But I don't recall ever being all that carefree
I worried about my dolls being lonely or disliking me behind my back
I fretted over ways to spend more time with my brothers
And I vividly recall running and jumping into bed at night, positive that if I didn't make it by the count of three than the monsters would be allowed to creep in
I remember sitting huddled under the covers, shaking and terrified of the shadows
Cowering until I could conjure up images of my mother's comforting shape sitting with me in the dark

I have always been good at putting my fears and anxieties aside and living in the moment for an hour or so while in the company of others
But when left alone to sit and think, my worries always etch away at my calm exterior
Causing others to point sympathetic sighs my way and ask me whats wrong
"Nothing." I always reply. "This is just my thinking face."

These days, my mind feels like a kept rodent, running some in a race on a stationary wheel that no one will ever win
It turns circles of questions about money and the future and occasionally the past
Can I afford the choices I've made? Are they the right choices? Can I keep my sanity and my jobs? Did I make a mistake? A misstep? Was I too quick to bring my belonging back East? Is a happier me living in some dimension out West right now? Why am I still here when I want desperately to be somewhere else? Why am I so ashamed when I run into people I went to Hight School with? Is this all fruitless? Pointless? Too expensive? Inevitably something to regret?
You would think that after having these questions as a constant white noise in my head literally. All. Day. Long.  that at night, I would be silenced into exhaustion
But the noise raises to a deafening volume.

When I cannot drown it out with NPR or my Sleepytime Mix, I drag myself out of bed and stumble around searching for my journal and a pen
And I write.
I write this.

And the scratching of the pen is a new soundtrack to listen to
And the letters become droopier as my eyelids finally, finally start to feel heavy
Is this being an adult?
Still afraid of the dark and wishing for my mother to come to the rescue
But rather than huddling in the dark afraid of the emptiness and unanswered questions, I turn on the light and make something
I dont feel any less scared or any more sure
But if writing is what gets me to sleep
And finally, finally slows my heart to a normal pace
And makes it feel stronger and more whole
And even as a child, I knew that there was a reason that so many people suggest that a main character just follow their heart

The Emerson story.

There are several checklists, written on notebook paper, and stuck to the doorframe in my bedroom. I put them there over a year ago when I was in the middle of applying to Grad school. The bottom sheet of paper has a list for every day of the week. Tasks are written in bold letters with my own made-up icons to designate varying degrees of importance. They are crossed out once, twice, and a third time with a satisfied flourish.

I stuck them to the wall, one on top of the other so I would see and take notice of them at the beginning and end of each day. The top piece of paper has a label on it that says "I love my job." I smile as I remember the day I cleverly made that piece of plastic. It was one of two that I printed out at work. The first read "My name is Marcy." I stuck both to the bottom of my skirt and grinned as I showed both to a friend and said "Only one of these is true. Guess which."

This is all from a time when I was incredibly stressed and it was making me frazzled and unhappy. I only applied to one Graduate school because it was the only one I really wanted to attend. When I got the rejection letter, I started planning a new escape. I decided that I just needed to go. I wanted to become one of the characters that I had always admired, the one who needs a change and so they just pack their shit and leave. I decided that I would move out West. It was terrifying and I loved just the act of planning. I packed, sold, and donated everything that I could do without. I notified, networked, and prepared to say goodbye. And throughout the whole process, I found that I was breathing deeper than I had in months.

I planned a party with my partner in crime to say Goodbye to all our friends at once. One week before the departure date that we had been obsessing over for more than a year, we got as many people as possible together at one bar. I drank and cried and discussed my plans, feeling a familiar big grin spread across my face. It was the grin I always had when I spoke about my move to California and the road trip that we would take to get ourselves out there. I came home looking forward to getting into my pajamas and climbing into bed. I barely paid attention to the letter that was sitting in front of the door leading to the stairs up to my apartment.

One year after not getting into Emerson's MFA in Creative Writing program, they reconsidered me and my application. Always one to give in to an opportunity to display my flare for the dramatic, I half laughed and half cried while my friend read out loud to me the words in the acceptance letter. I calmed down enough to leave my parents a calm and stable voice mail. They were on the West Coast for a wedding so I knew they would still be awake. When they called back, I walked into my bathroom to answer the phone and let my friend sleep.

There, perched on my closed toilette with my feet on the edge of my tub at 2 am, I told my parents the news. I listened to my mother cry and my father's shocked Congratulations. My mind was not made up, I wasn't sure that I could afford this financially or that I was ready to give up on California yet. As my parents drove around California, their GPS constantly shouting out about missed turns, they talked me into changing my plans.

A little over an hour of talk and a hot shower later, I finally got into my pajamas and climbed into bed. Where I stared at the wall and thought. The next day, I was in charge of two small children. I am ashamed to say, I let them play Wii for hours and enjoy the Photo Booth on my lap top while I went back on to the Emerson website to try to imagine what fall would be like. I didn't want to tell people because I was still convinced it was a fluke. But when my best friend called and said "I know we haven't had a chance to talk in a while but I felt like I had to talk to you today" I took it as a sign to tell her everything.

I confirmed with the admissions office and sent in my enrollment fee. I changed my plans and settled in to the fact that I would spend the summer continuing my path of the last three years. But in the fall, I will go back to school. I so rarely talk about fate or destiny; I think these are thing we have to create on our own. But suddenly I am able to fill in the big blanks of my future that used to be hazy question marks. I know who and where I want to be in three years. Though, if this experience has taught me anything it's that you don't want to plan anything in advance too thoroughly. Or: plan, but be prepared for life to get in the way and do some scheming of its own.

I dont need Emerson to give me some self worth or tell me that I can write. I have always written and I never planned to stop. But now I have the means to make my life what I want it to be. I applied to Emerson on my own but apparently I was a just a bit too early. And the best part is, it makes for a really great story.

You and Me

You only begin to understand who you are once you remove yourself from your home

When the world outside your window stops being predictable

And even the road signs are new

They warn of falling rocks and flooded highways

The familiar highways and turns are long gone

The Country opens up when you go out West

Speeding down a highway, you play music and sing out loud,

Eyes wide as you try to take it all in and commit it to memory

Predicting the days that you will tell children with familiar eyes, noses, and perhaps a constellations of freckles about the days when you too were young and curious anxious to see everything

Suddenly you are recalling terms from 7th grade Geography class because they are hovering in the distance and looming around every bend

You take a friend and have to re-learn each other

Because this is not the same friendship you had at school and in the city

You are sharing a space and often sharing silences

You are singing together and making decisions

Weighing smart decisions against the craving for an adventure

Framing how you will tell the stories to your friends and wondering which details you will remember differently

One is looking out to the desert and the other watching the sky

But this You is not You

It is me.

You can watch the Road trip movies and read the books

You can read this poem and ask me about it later

But until you get on the road

Until you watch the mountains leap up and marvel that the GPS is telling you not to turn for another 500 miles

Until you understand that this part of the world is older than you can imagine

You cannot know how you will feel

If you will feel small and young or scared and insignificant

Maybe you will feel powerful and proud of the roads sandwiched between cliffs and cactuses

I am in awe of this country

I am young and my eyes are open

I am seeing a new world and I will bring it home with me

I will share it with you and remind you repeatedly that it is here

Waiting for you

That we may build skyscrapers to feel strong and bold, but the mountains were here first and they will be here after

and they will change you if you let them.

Dreaming

I grabbed a book to read before bed,

And as my eyes slid shut,

the pages took a nose dive down to slump on my chest

The words slid through my skin and into my dreams

They were words of adventure

Beauty and ink forming tales of passion in my mind,

Stories of a world where the hero can take any shape

And tonight that shape is mine

I had returned to the comfort of a classic to spend some time before sleeping

Asleep, I still knew the story inside and out

The words bled through the layers of the real world and into my imaginary one

Asleep, I watched as the letters reform into shapes,

creating a new world for me to explore

I wake, still feeling the weight of a sword at my hip and the breeze of adventure on my face

There is a desire within me, responsible for pulling the words in as I slept

I am a reader and writer who longs to put the paper down and become the character

I want to live in the sea of letters that that I devote so many hours to reading and writing

I read along as Peter and Wendy fly, fight, and duel

I sigh as they accidentally fall in love, being too young to understand how it will change them

I am too busy daydreaming to see the possibility of experiencing love with my eyes open

I envy the magic written for my favorite characters rather than creating and living my own

When I wake up, I fill blank pages with words that create worlds

I cling to my dreams just a little bit longer by reforming them and sinking them into the pages with my pen

As I scribble, I wish that the pages would fill themselves

I want to witness magic, so I write it

and re read it

And wait to fall back asleep into another adventure

Waiting.

(I wrote the beginning of this while sitting in a coffee shop about a year ago. My friend, Tyler, and I picked an older woman sitting alone and decided to write a story about who she might be. I finally just found a way to finish it.)

The date was September 26^th but that was the only thing that had changed. Every day, nothing changed but the numbers. The days, weeks, months and years added up to a number far too large to comprehend but she was not interested in the math.

The days moved on but she stayed still. Her posture, hairstyle, and even her coffee order stayed the same. As the days raced on like an athlete determined to be the first to feel the finish line absorb the weight of their final triumphant step, her feet stayed still. Crossed at the ankles, under the same table in the same coffee shop. She waited.

He had left her in that coffee shop, and now she waited for him to come back for her. She was determined that it would be in that exact place that he would find her again. His path had taken him away from her, but hers had come to a halt the moment he walked out the door.

She had still been a young woman on that day. She had dressed in green because it was his favorite color on her. She remember flirting with the mirror as she applied her light makeup, he always said she looked much prettier without a layer of stuff on her face. She had been excited to go to “their place” and loved it almost as much as she loved the idea that there was a place that they called theirs. Looking in the mirror, she had wondered if they would go for a walk or maybe just sit and talk for hours. She had looked forward to the day because she knew that it would be full of him.

She had been making sure to arrive at their coffee shop early ever since he casually remarked how he loved entering to the sight of her sitting there. How he loved seeing her sitting at the dimly lit table in the corner, holding onto and taking comfort from her warm caffeinated beverage until he could take its place. He loved to see her sitting and waiting, loved knowing that it was he she was waiting for.

The day had held so much promise as it stretched itself lazily before her. It had been a gift waiting to be opened, a treasure waiting to be found. She had enjoyed taking time to revel in the anticipation of their time together.

She watched him walk in and could not stop her face from stretching into a grin to greet his. Her girlhood dreams danced in her eyes like fire flues caught in a jar on a warm summer night. It was another thing that he had told her he always loved about her. She was incapable of keeping her emotions from dancing around her face, especially the happy ones.

His eyes had seemed a shade darker than usual, but it was hard to be sure because they refused to meet hers. Now, she realized that this had been a sign but it was one that she had chosen to ignore at the time. When he finally pushed out the words that he was leaving, they had been directed to the table rather than at her. As he rambled on, she thought it sounded as if a deep fog had drifted in to push against his words as they fought to reach her ears.

He looked at her briefly before pushing away from the table and retracing his steps to the door. She called after him that she would wait. That there would never be another for her, that when he returned home it would be to his favorite image of her. She promised that her top would be green and that her eyes would light up with love for him. He had started to leave before she had finished, but she knew that he had heard her. She had watched his back and shoulders absorb the weight of her words.

The street around the shop had changed over the years. The park that they used to walk in had become a parking lot and the bookstore was now a bank of America. The young faces of the people behind the counter had not aged; they simply morphed into new faces. But they did not interest her; there was only one face that she wanted to see. She often wondered how time might have inflicted itself on him. She pictured him standing tall as always, but with streaks of white in his hair. Would he have wrinkles to echo hers? Would time have worked his voice to a lower tone, would it rumble a bit when he spoke?

She wondered when he would come back, but never if. She debated whether it would take a moment for him to scan the faces around him before landing on hers with recognition. Sometimes she pictured the long moment of watching his face fall while he worried that she was not there only to see him light up from the inside with joy. Other times, she imagined that he would be as sure as she was, that he would simply know that she would be at their table, and would walk in with the same confidence as always.

She would have nothing exciting to tell him, he paused her life when he left her. The world had shifted around her, and she had stayed completely still at the center of its rotation. She knew that he would fill her in on the details of his life. She could not wait to hear what he had done to make his journey back to her. She could not wait to meet the man that he had grown into. She pictured a more distinguished version of the boy she had known and hoped that he had not grown up entirely. She wondered what she would say to bring out his soft chuckle for the first time, and a soft smile flitted on her lips. It was as if she was recalling a memory rather than creating a moment that had yet to occur. She sat still every day, but her mind jumped form the past to the future, leaping decades. Never doubting, just waiting.

One day, she did not enter through the front doors of the coffee shop. The young woman behind the counter, Carrie, had been about to prepare her coffee and was shocked by the silence. She had been expecting the bells of the door to chime, but when the door opened twenty minuets later it was for a young woman and her child. The old woman never came in. Just before her shift ended, Carrie learned that the old woman had died in her sleep. It was supposed to be the most peaceful way to go, but Carrie knew that there was never any peace for someone who is always waiting and wanting. Carrie hoped that she had passed while having the dream in which her lover had never left and their children and grandchildren surrounded them in the home they had made together.

The next day an old man entered the coffee shop. Carrie watched his eyes move slowly over every face inside. When they landed on the empty table, they filled with an endless amount of emotion that seemed to age him another decade. With a deep breath, he walked over to the table and decided that he would simply wait for his lover to come in. She had promised that she would be there, after all.

The day after that, Carrie proposed to her boyfriend. They were in love and she knew that he was waiting for the perfect moment to ask her, but she had had enough of waiting, She did not want to wait; she wanted to live.

New story that I made up for the boys.

Once upon a time there was a village with a wonderful little cheese shop. The family who owned the shop loved to create new cheeses every night. One night, the father created a new cheese that was so smelly that no one could bare to sample it. In fact, in the morning, the cheese was so stinky that they could not even get close enough to throw it out. They simply locked it down in the basement and tried to forget about it.

As the days passed, the smell got worse and worse until finally, the family had to leave the shop and move in with their in-laws in a nearby village. In a matter of weeks, the smell had gotten so bad that the entire shop smelled like the stinky cheese. After a month, the entire village had moved away because no one could get close enough to simply throw the cheese away. Soon, the entire state was empty and in less than a year, the entire half of the country had moved to the other half to escape the horrible, awfully, stinky cheese.

Eventually, the entire populating of the world had moved into boats on the ocean because it was the only place to live without constant eye watering from the stinky cheesy smell. Eventually, all the Kings, Queens, and Presidents of the world got together to discuss how to solve the problem. No one was brave enough to go back to the Country, travel to the village, find the cheese shop, go down into the basement, and take care of the cheese. What they didn't know was that the reason the smell had become so strong was that the cheese had been growing.

When the last villager had moved away, the cheese had taken over the entire bottom half of the shop. When the state had emptied, the whole shop and the nearby buildings were covered in the dairy mold. When the entire continent was abandoned, half of it had been nothing but cheese.

Finally, the world knew that there was nothing to do but leave their beloved planet. As soon as they had built enough rocket ships, they all took off for a nearby planet that had been discovered by a brilliant astronomer. The new planet had plenty of water and trees, and they named it Earth.

At night, when the sun went down and they were able to see their old home, they saw that the entire thing had been consumed by the white cheese. They marveled at how beautiful it was, and decided to name it the moon. Every night, they were thankful that there were just enough miles between their new and old home that they did not have to smell it.

The end.