today walking through the university of michigan campus i realized that i wanted to go back to oberlin. this was after weeks of sometimes not wanting it, just wanting to keep spending all my money on comet coffee and rope yoga and employee meal sandwiches too big to fit into your belly in the 20 minutes of break time. but i kept seeing the people i wanted to see where they weren't, like displaced ghosts, and i wanted wilder bowl so bad i almost just let myself want it, instead of changing my mind a minute later just so i could not have what i wanted, or at least not want what i have.

this month i am experimenting with acting in grown-up ways i always considered perpetually too grown up to ever act- my winter term project is an unofficial delving into romance based off of richard linklater films and my own misguided worst nightmares, as i've always felt an aversion to happiness. i feel half twelve and half thirty, and don't know whether to wait for a collapse straight out of middle school hallways, or for sprawling pipe dream realizations of front porches and kitchen counters. sometimes i do not feel old enough for myself, don't trust myself saying grown-up things to someone and don't trust them believing what was said. when are we old enough to know what we want and mean it? or maybe it's the opposite, when are we old enough to stop knowing what we want. or worse, we say we know what we want, not knowing when we're old enough to trust our horrible young selves.

there is a minor phenomenon in our culture in which non-happiness ironically becomes a raison d'etre. we have effectively sensationalized sadness, and i now (dumbly) feel at times out of the loop to have left the club of people who listen to lua on replay and don't even blink when some other girl tugs her sleeve down over her mound of bracelets. i think all of us were maybe a little sickly determined to have bigger, truer problems than the rest- now i'm almost disappointed to scramble and find none. it should not be that surprising. but still i wonder, how many newly-happier people are fully happy with their happiness.

i've fallen back into john berryman's sonnets to chris, and tonight am particularly taken by the first one, which seems appropriate. so here it is:

I wished, all the mild days of middle March
This special year, your blond good-nature might
(Lady) admit-- kicking abruptly tight
With will and affection down your breast like starch--
Me to your story, in Spring, and stretch, and arch.
But who not flanks the wells of uncanny light
Sudden in bright sand towering? A bone sunned white.
Considering travellers bypass these and parch.

This came to less yes than an ice cream cone
Let stand... though still my sense of it is brisk:
Blond silky cream, sweet cold, aches: a door shut.
Errors of order! Luck lies with the bone,
Who rushed (and rests) to meet your small mouth, risk
Your teeth irregular and passionate.


Things I particularly love:
the seventh line, with its continuation of the run-on sentence and then that quick wonderful phrase of the bone sunned white.
all of the wonderful hyperbaton that makes the logic seem roundabout and muddled and train-of-thought-like and like a maze. it is amazing, which is what that word actually means, which also is really cool.
the fact that the fifth line starts with "me," as if asserting the speaker's place in the story, which even after so much roundaboutness, is kinda the point.

the last line. well maybe the last two lines. but the last line especially.

someone talked to me once about friendship, all the different shapes it takes. his explanation broke things down by what the two people do together: friends who share gossip, friends who share secrets, friends who share regrets, then hand-holding friends, tooth-kissing friends, ear-biting, let-me-into-your-bed friends. sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don't, and i don't know which is more dangerous.

in 2010,

i resolve to eat crisper apples, have fewer split ends, and do whatever i can not to grow shorter.