Lagan

Originally written a year ago in August. Trying to make up for lost time.  

Everyone's right and no one is sorry
That's the start and end of this story

Orientation is over. I'm on my way to another official position of employment. Another job where I work with children, with the smallest of individuals, with 'actual people' I swear, with pre-schoolers this time around. I don't know my hours or schedule yet, just that I start working at my center with my kids on Tuesday. My, my, my. My short-term solution, my stop-gap, my total lack of future plans. And so it goes. I'm sitting, freezing- vessels restricting, taking on a darker hue- in a Caribou Coffee shop in Woodbury. Hub of artificial air, calm conversations filling empty spaces, suburbanites in suburban attire reaching for what? Clear cut consciences? Questions of convenience? I don't fit here, though looks can be deceiving, in my work polo and khaki shorts, computer keys a-clacking. First-world problems, and I'm so removed from my kids at Hall, it stings through my chattered teeth.

I feel it deep, smothering, holding me and whispering in my ear, "this is who you are." Though I argue, I fight, I think, 'I lived in Africa, dammit. I volunteer. I worked at an inner city treatment facility. I worked at a North Minneapolis public school. I made a goddamn difference.' this middle-class legacy clings to me like a blanket on a Midwest winter's eve. Is this my birthright? Will this characteristic of cautious convenience define me? Lacking clarity, I search for veins of truth, twisted and tangled branches from my past, memories of who I've been. Of past, present, possibilities. Everything's an inkblot, and Rorschach resonates. Or in other words, "We are our own meiosis, past lives meshed in blurry Punnet squares, this faulty biology that could leave us any one of a number of freaks, depending on the day."

I hear strings in the park
I don't like to call or write
Except when it's too late at night
I mostly just think in the dark

Is it strange that I'm fitting, stealing the formatting of your words? Pilfered words amongst us is the norm I know, but architecture and foundation, is it too much? Either way, you speak of pictures from the past, of the past. In between cryptic collections of Bon Iver's litany and poorly translated Hemingway and Neruda, I remember the red dirt of Sa Leone. (Was it really red at all? My body rebels, playing tricks on me from afar, from within; and these memories are no exception. What can we say about the line between fact and fiction, real and imagined, experiences and dreams and illusions and wishful thinking and secondhand lions or lines? What else but poorly penned pieces of a puzzle, portions of passion?)

I remember the red dirt of Sa Leone. A porch, a piece of concrete, a landing outside of the first floor of the place I knew as home. We were on a ship, on the water, the specific knowledge of this sea-going surprising to me now. (That this memory lasted this long, that this happened at all). We were on a boat and I fell off into the water. "Man ahoy, land overboard!" Maybe, I don't remember most of the conversation. Except there I was, sprawled in the dirt, waiting for a rescue that wouldn't come. Waiting for something that none of you could give me, would give me. "Why do you have to be so ______?" This I remember, clearly. Melodramatic, perhaps, though the word seems several shirt sizes too large for the context. Though you always were the little teacher. Dramatic, maybe. Or simply, "Why do you always have to be saved?"
I waited in the dirt. In that red clay, in the glaring light of an ever-shining sun, in that dry heat. Did I get up after a couple of seconds? Did I lay there for minutes? Did any of that happen at all? Am I still waiting? (Melodramatic, indeed)

Where does that leave me now?

The full moon makes
Our faces shine
Like over-ironed polyester

Orientation is over. Soon I'll be on my bike, on my way to South Saint Paul. Radio Drive to Bailey down a half-mile decline over the river side-by-side with 494 to a section of the MRT that takes me to a road to another road to a strip mall to a CAP Agency Head Start classroom. To Jocelyn. I'll ride with my duffel bag strapped on shoulders, digging into skin. Carrying this laptop, carrying these words, carrying these letters after letters after letters- years worth of mistakes and musings and misgivings and misplaced hope and desire and fear and depression and memories and memories and memories. My back will bend, strain from the weight. We carry so much with us. All of us, I suppose. But it's easier for me to see our luggage.

I'm trying to go slow, dropping off letters, scraps, snapshots, opening up the smallest scars to show to Jocelyn. Of course, I gave her the ascribed warning, the obligatory so-you-know statement of depression and anxiety and entropy. Plain language fails me so often, but I have this- 'I really like her.' Perils aside, we spend words, time, energy, plans, possibilities with each other. And so it goes- the constant, the truth- and words fail.

I was unafraid, I was a boy
I was a tender age

I've been forgetting things. A staple of simplicity, I know, but this seems more than a high cost of time.