dropped stitch

in the end, my hands feel like they have been covered in honey.
this was nothing to be transcended.
this was bare feet in the river and hands sticky with avoiding promises.

in the end, i tugged so hard on loose threads
the whole hat came undone.
maybe i am your dropped stitch,
or maybe you are mine,
but now all either of us have is a mess of yarn.

it's summer anyway.
i wouldn't have used any sort of knitted anything for a long time anyway.

Tea kettle

At one point, I had my public library card number memorized. This was the outcome of a particularly slow last year and a half of high school. My friends all had boyfriends. Nothing took up enough of my time. I spent a lot of it reserving books via inter-library loan and typing and re-typing a 14 digit number into the Anchorage Public Library website.

I remember, very distinctly, feeling like I didn’t have enough time to read. (For context, I was probably averaging two books a week. Maybe one non-fiction to every 10 YA lit books where someone smooches someone else at the end.) I figured, like I always figure, that when that period of my life ended I would have time to do some serious reading.

But no one told me college libraries don’t have fiction sections. Gone, gone are the days of wrapping myself in a mattress pad at night because I was too busy reading to put new sheets on my bed after laundry day.

I also remember tugging the ends of my hair and willing it to grow at age 15, thinking, my hair won’t be as long as I want it to be until I’m a senior in college and by then I’ll be so old that I won’t care about my looks anymore and all will have been wasted.

I am a tea kettle, constantly brewing misconceptions.

I hate talking about the passage of time and the weather, but: is it March next week? March last year was seeped in so much unsettlement, the nascent stages of all the emotions that grew into tall trees in the fall. It doesn’t seem so long ago.

I realize my blog suffers both the weaknesses of being infrequently updated and short on personal information--especially when I travel to new places! Do new things! Climb onto new rooftops and eat new fruits! So, insufficient though it may be, here is a brief summary of events:

Three weeks ago, seven boys who were watching the Super Bowl saw a commercial for sending flowers, which reminded them of a friend who’s address they asked me for. And then they sent me flowers too, finding themselves, no doubt, much deeper in the Israeli flower business than they'd ever expected. “Whoa, who loves you?” all the women in my office asked. To which I could truthfully respond, “Seven boys watching football in a bar in Alaska.” The flowers are dying now, which my roommate so helpfully pointed out over the weekend. ("Dead. Like your heart.”)

I went to Budapest last weekend. It was cold and crisp and I wore my favorite hat and walked across bridges and observed monuments to communism that towered tall above me and contemplated how small I am in the universe (so small) and how quickly we move on (at a moderate pace, it seems). When we got there and I squeezed myself off the budget airline, we had to run through a chilly night, chasing a bus I wasn’t sure was there. It was, and I remembered suddenly that I wasn’t over any of this.

Two weeks ago, I woke up early on a Saturday to play Frisbee on the beach. It felt both like a summer day and familiar. I threw the Frisbee into the road (unimpressive) and gracefully jumped a fence to run into oncoming traffic and retrieve it (impressive). We drank fresh passionfruit juice in the afternoon. Someone got sunburned. It rained the entire following week.

not so good at this

in the fall, i learned about writing things down that will never not be true.
sometimes this means that words are blue willow plates.
sometimes this means saying almost nothing at all.
sometimes it means waiting until something can be true before it can be said.
you learned no such thing.

in the corner of the diner you work at most nights,
the evening shift workers come in for coffee like clockwork.
you know their faces better than mine by now.
they ask you about your days,
and you fold dreams into their napkins.
mid-afternoon is all too often taken for granted,
you tell me when our kaleidoscopes match up for a moment.

i am sand stuck in a bathing suit.
i am a jellyfish sting on your leg.
you are salt water in my eyes.
i forgot the sunscreen. our sandwiches are hot.
there's only one water bottle.
you lost your sunglasses in the ocean.
the convenience store was out of all popsicle flavors except grape.
we are not so good at this.

i will never unfold napkin dreams at midnight.
i will write blue willow plate letters
and wait to send them until the sentiments feel true.
i will sometimes match my kaleidoscope to yours.
i will pass on the grape popsicles.
i will wait until i hang up to cry.