thoughts on the fall-winter transition
2007-10-13 4:56 a.m.

i don't care about the 12-year-old girls. they don't know. they've only begun. zac efron's crooked smile is nothing compared to yours.

tonight was a fart of an evening. that means i didn't do any scholarly work. i talked to people.

fall is here, oh fall. you and your straight spine, your brisk tea. i'd welcome you more if you didn't signal the beginning of something harsher. i used to love winter a lot more when i would have snowdays and take voyages through the neighborhood, two feet deep in the snow, falling into it when tired, eating it when bored. waving to confused cats in windows.

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but there's no real winter here. only a shuddered breath.

enough of this.

--

things are rolling along, even if i'm a little poorer than usual. if i write two good stories by december, then phase one of my thesis will be complete. phase two is revision.

things roll. whether or not we're ready. it's been a hard semester so far. in a lot of different ways. the future--is terrifying.

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i knew a girl with an blue eyes and an ugly face. she was blockish, carved like a totem pole. in my head i mix her up with another girl i knew: one with a barbed wire tattoo. they were both flag girls, if you know what that means and what it implies. ours were called The Lionettes. not The Lionesses--the real term--because that would somehow imply grace and prowess, not wooden brows and barbed wire tattoos.

these two girls. oh. danced on the football field at halftime and tossed dark blue flags out of synch. i sat in the bleachers half a dozen times. this was when i was half-thought going to those things mattered. i always wore the wrong kind of outerwear to the games: a light sweater or one too few scarves, and i was always, always cold. my whole body stiff with coldness, and half of me proud of this important sacrifice, and half of me clouded with dark ideas i didn't have a vocabulary for.

one time i went home after the game and thawed myself out in the kitchen, sitting on a thin pillow from the living room to comfort my clammy ass. i thought. those girls and their idiot flags--why even? did anyone see them, anyway? or me? perhaps i needed a tattoo, or perhaps i needed the opposite of a tattoo. choices are limited for flag girls. they would have babies before they were 24. the world seemed a dark, blue-lit place, with twisting, ice-covered paths that never crossed themselves.

i sat on the pillow and waited for the feeling to return to my parts. i finally did warm up, but it took so long that twice i checked my reflection in the sliding glass door to make sure that my features were still there, still properly round, that my face had not been carved away as ice carves a canyon open when it melts and moves across the earth.