amicable breakup

there is red paint on my knees,
i crawled in it the last time that
someone told to "express myself."
like this was an 8th grade art class.
like an empty piece of paper
could hold all of the things that i wanted to say.

instead i squeezed a tube of red acrylic paint
onto the floor of your cabin, and used
one of your three spoons to make angry designs,
like spirals could hold all my feelings.
red, i figured, for love
and war
and strawberries
and the blood bank
and your shoe laces.

after you kicked me out
("no matter what you feel, you cannot paint on my floor")
i made a list of places i wanted to move.
(your backyard,
zanzibar,
cincinnati,
the biography section of the library.)
and essentials to pack in my backpack.
(a toothbrush,
two pairs of socks,
a set of watercolors,
flares just in case,
a pen.)

my mom always made me write a note if i went anywhere,
so this is my note, to tell you i'm leaving.
i don't think i'm ever coming back.

Happy Naw-Ruz!

It's a new year, with all of the familiarity of last year's snow still sitting heavy on the ground.

At least the sun sticks around for longer. And I don't need to wear my big pink poofy coat anymore. I think my days as fluorescent marshmellow are behind me, but spring is a finicky lady at this latitude so I'm never quite sure.

Tonight is the last night of my last spring break of college. I made chili to celebrate with ground beef Valerie's parents vaccuum-packed and mailed to her when she kept getting low hematocrit scores at the bloodbank.

In honor of spring cleaning, I cleared out a trash bag's worth of clothing that I've accumulated from various dump trips over the last year. I also spent several hours meticulously reading through banjolele user reviews on Amazon.

"You're going to show up in Haifa with a backpack full of dump clothes and an orchestra of weird stringed instruments," Valerie remarked.

Now I want a mandolin too.

My brother and I are both graduating this spring, him from high school and me from college, so we're planning one of those rites-of-passage backpacking trips right now. You know, the kind where you fill the small pockets on your backpack with earrings from artisan markets and eat ice cream from corner stores?

I keep googling imaging cities in warm climates on the coast, knowing full well that this is it for winter and I for a few years. I want to be less anxious about seeing the snow melt, but patience is not a virtue I'm very good at during breakup season.

Lately,

Even though I was in a small car with three other people for most of my winter break, I still managed to get left alone long enough to cut off about five inches of hair one afternoon in the bathroom.

The thing about staring yourself in the mirror and saying "whatever, hair grows back" and shrugging indifferently is that the growing back is agonizing (as a metaphor for things in life that take patience and--no implied meaning--as several months of bad hair days).

I'm starting to think there's a correlation between girls who have the patience to grow their hair out and girls who have the patience to find and keep boyfriends.

///

I'm taking oboe lessons again, because I needed a few more credits this semester and because I realized recently that I wasted three and a half years being melodramatic about playing music and it was time to suck it up and move on with life.

It's fun because Candy bestows such gems during our time together as "I've noticed all these boys talk to you. You could have a million boyfriends" and "Don't be nervous. No one knows who you are" and "Is that from Value Village? You could be a Value Village model."

But it's also fun because, oh yeah, I love this. I forgot that.

///

It's the Baha'i fast again. The time of year between March 2-20 where Baha'is don't eat or drink between sunrise and sunset. Tomorrow is day 5 out of 19.

Usually I look forward to this time of year. I like challenging myself and figuring out what I'm capable of, whether it's skipping lunch or moving a million miles away or managing a newspaper for a year or feigning indifference at my most recent self-imposed haircut.

And I like the reminder that we're more than our material connection to this world.

But this year it feels different. Like I'm just going through the motions.

///

It snowed today. Soft, small Fairbanks flakes that have been piling up outside since I got out of bed this morning. The kind of snow that just happens. The kind that makes me exasperated with and appreciative of winter all at once.

I don't know at what point I started to like Fairbanks so much. It just started, soft and small, piling up slowly, until at some point I realized I was wading through three inches of affection and it was sticking to my boots and melting onto the hem of my jeans, staying damp long after I shook it off.