The Yellow Shirt

Simon had always like the color yellow.  Which is why he went for the furthest stained cardboard box, one of many containing donated clothes from Our Lady of Lost Souls' quarterly drive for the homeless.  The boxes were stacked on a few folding tables in front of the church where they normally congregated to wait in line for their breakfast and dinner.  Nothing had price tags, it was all free.  But there were rules.  They couldn't start choosing until 2pm.  Whoever touched an item first, could keep it.  And they each only got to pick three things.  This would be his fifth time "shopping" at the church.

It had begun to get hot again, sticky, and his winter flannel shirt was beginning to feel too warm, and too worn in the elbows and armpits.  He needed a new summer shirt.  He hoped he could find a hat too.  He'd been told many times that he looked good in a hat.  It went well with his beard.  He was keeping an open mind for his third item.

He walked slowly behind the line of others looking silently through the boxes, keeping his eye on the furthest one with the yellow bit of fabric sticking out.  No one was really paying much attention to it.  He decided that he would touch that corner first as soon as he got to it, even though he couldn't be quite positive what it was.  He was pretty sure it was a shirt, he just hoped it wasn't too small.  It would be fine if it was too big, baggy shirts let the skin breath in the muggy Louisiana summers.  He finally got there, his eyes focused on it like a hawk and his fingers grasped at it just as Jerry went for it too.  "Sorry, man.  I touched it first."  Jerry was disappointed but he knew the rules and because he hadn't chosen anything yet, he didn't want to risk being asked to leave.

Simon felt triumphant as he pulled it out from beneath the piles of mismatched socks, patched jeans and discarded shirts with race dates, bands and festivals printed on the fronts and back.    Simon hoped that the yellow would be relatively un-printed.  It wasn't.  It had four large letters on the front, but they didn't make any sense to him.  He figured it was some abbreviation for a college he had never heard of or an organization.

He wore it for the first time the next day, a beautiful day, crisp and without any hint of humidity.  The shirt felt good on his back.  It was baggy, and almost brand new.  He wondered why someone would have given up such a great shirt in such a perfect color.  He had been wearing it for less than an hour when he heard drunken bellows and shouts coming from an oncoming trolley.  He was used to this but he didn't recognized the word they kept repeating.  "YOLO, YOLO, YOLO!" The four twenty-something boys yelled from their open window as the street car slowly came to halt at a red light near where Simon was standing on the corner.  They were raising their plastic cups full of hurricanes and sticky gin and tonic's to him, and continued to yell "YOLO" as the street car pulled away.  He raised his hand and waved at them as they rode on, high-fiving, and laughing with their gleaming white teeth and backwards caps.  He was happy to have been a part of their joy for a moment.  He smiled his own yellowed smile through his ragged beard, long and bristled and unkempt.  His face and pants were dirty.  His shoes worn and falling apart.  But his shirt was new.  It was his favorite color.  And apparently whatever was written on it gave cause for celebration.

He tapped a young girl, her eyes stained with kohl, her tights black and white striped beneath her safety-pin marked skirt.  "Excuse me, what does this stand for?" he asked as he pointed to his chest.

She rolled her eyes and took out one earbud.

"Fucking tweens came up with it a couple of years ago, it means 'You Only Live Once.'" she said as she replaced the earbud and turned back to staring down the street, waiting for the next car.

His heart sank and it felt like he had been punched in the gut. His smile disappeared as quickly as the boys had.

"Ya," he said to the girl, even though she wasn't listening, "you do only live once."

Clarity

The season has finally gotten around to changing.  It has been up and down, hot and cold, cloudy and bright for what has felt like months.  I couldn't get into a routine, and I had been feeling really bad about it.  I missed working out, I missed cooking at home, I missed reading as much as I used to when I was in school - even if it was assigned.  But more than anything I missed writing.  Too much work, too many after-work drinks, too many things that I want to do, too many obligations/responsibilities/dishes/laundry/grocery shopping.  And on top of all of that, I burdened myself with the disappointment that I am not doing anything with my "degrees."

I am my own worst enemy.

But then, there are those moments of clarity, when a friends asks me: "If you could do whatever you wanted, what would you do?"  I responded that I would write, I would write constantly, books and essays and short stories and reviews and editorials.  And the funny thing is I am already doing it.  Just because I haven't published anything, just because I haven't made a name for myself out there, just because I feel like there is still much that I can learn and do and practice and revise and change and finish and start all over, doesn't mean I'm not a writer yet. 

I am.

I am doing exactly what I want to do, when and how I want to do it.  I am the girl that is talked about in this article.  I have a job but not a career.  And that is exactly how I want it.  Even though the scared and responsible and culturally influenced part of me gets nervous sometimes that I should settle down and grab a 9-5, the bigger part of me, the brave part, the adventurous part doesn't want those constrictions.

So in this new season, on these warmer days with weather that allows for sitting outside and floating down a river and walking long walks with Roxy, I will remember to be a little kinder to myself.  I will try to be patient, and the only diligence and determination that I will try to strengthen will be in my pursuit of writing, my craft, my outlet, my passion.  I will complete those 10,000 hours.  I will embody the life of a writer.  I will walk the path of a traveler.  And I will soak up all that this time and this place and these people have to offer.

19-Years A Slave

Writing has become like a gym membership that is never used.  It is paid for, month after month.  It is referenced, I talk about writing like I talk about doing squats or dreaming about a beach-body.  I want to do it, like I want to go to the gym.  I know it will be good for me, like I know a beach-body will not magically replace the soft doughy parts of me without some significant time on the treadmill. 

And working as much as I have only widens the gap of time since my fingers last struck the keys of my laptop in any real and meaningful and creative way.  

I've felt adrift.  I've felt purposeless.  I have this new project started, loads of ideas for it, plenty of experience at researching and drafting and compiling.  But I haven't started doing any of the work.

I wonder, so often, what was the point of going to college.  Nine years.  Ninety. Thousand. Dollars.  And I'm still doing what I did when I was fifteen - working in a restaurant - working myself to death.  I am envious of people that have the savings account and cushions and families and jobs and partners who provide security for them.  It is my own, harsh reality knowing that I have dug myself into this hole. I have put myself in this place of 60-hour work weeks because I wanted to go to college.  I wanted to go to grad school.  If I didn't have student loans to pay back, I would work four days a week - no doubles - and I would write.  I would have a savings account.  I would have new clothes and shoes.  I don't buy new things until it is absolutely necessary.  Partly because I've become pretty minimalist in my mid-twenties and partly because I can't stomach forking over several shift's-worth of cash for shoes or jeans or anything else because what I have is working out just fine for right now.

It's pretty fucked up that I went to school to learn to do something that I don't have time for BECAUSE I have to work to pay for those lessons those years those classes those experiences.  It makes me want to scream.  It makes me want to go back.  It makes me wish I could have a do-over.  Or at the very least, have picked a double major that would have gotten me a better job than this one.

And yes, yes few (if any) readers out there, I am aware that I am qualified for some things - thing I might even love.  But I can't afford to work there.  I can't afford to relocate.  I can't afford it.  Sallie Mae and ACS Education Services and Grand Valley State - they own me.  I am their indentured servant for the next 19 years.  "19-Years a Slave" will be the title of my collected essays.  Essays about the tragic irony of receiving an education only to realize it will do nothing for you - for me.

So I am off again, headed to work,again.  When I all I want to do is stay home and write, stay in and research, try and find motivation to live creatively beyond the sick desire to write the next Gone Girl so that I can pay some things off, take a break, not work so much when I should want to write only for the joy of it.  

Why not?

Before and during this trip, I've been asked "why?" a lot.

                               "Why are you going?"

                                                                                              "Why are you here?"

"Why now?"

                                                            "Why there?"

But when asked, what other answer could I possibly give:

Why not?

I don't remember much about our first few visits to New Orleans.  We only lived an hour away then.  I was eleven.  I remember the flower crowns with colored ribbons blowing out behind our small backs.  I remember the book of houses describing the histories and rooms and gardens and inhabitants - both past and present of the Garden District.  It was a green book with a white house, outlined, like a house-ghost.
But I do not remember the houses themselves.  I remember walking and walking and sweating and thirsting but not the houses we were walking around to see.

Just the book.

Just the heat.

Just the thirst.


                            

And now, as an adult I decided to come back.  To see it now.  To remember it again.  I brought my momma, my sweet and enthusiastic momma.  My encouraging and adventurous champion.  Swollen feet be damned, she walked everywhere with me.  Throngs of people drunkenly stumbling out of the bars, she and I walked downtown on a Friday night.  She wanted to see the lights.  See it at night.  See it after the sun had gone down.  Her cheeks pinked when she saw the naked girls.  She heard the shouting drunk men.   She saw the sticky wet concrete and the homeless men and women and dogs and beads, everywhere beads.  But she came along.  I took the turn down into the madness of Bourbon Street and she followed, eager, curious and willing.  We walked six blocks through that alternate universe, that foreign land, and then returned to our nook, our safe haven, our refuge of escaping somewhere together.


                  





I don't think a person needs a reason to travel other than for its own sake.  If I had stayed home, if I had worked, if I had slept in and walked the dog, and done laundry and washed the car, I would have felt accomplished, but I wouldn't have recalled that weekend as being any more special than another.  If I had saved my money, put it towards retirement or another, bigger vacation, I would have felt a little bit more secure.  But I wouldn't have gotten to catch up with my mom.  I wouldn't have been able to see the tombs and mausoleums and statues and river and trolleys.  I wouldn't have seen the voodoo dolls and the oysters and the washtub bands on the street corners.  The break dancers in the square.  The Faulkner House.  The masks the colors the beads the art the tattoos the coffee the beignets the history the haunted condos the sky the breeze the people the place.

                   




               

               


I fly out in seven hours.  I am already planning my next trips (New York, Boulder, San Francisco).  But like every other place I've visited, I try to picture myself living there.  Could I make a home here?  Could I work here?  Could I write?  I bet I could.  If not forever, for a little while.

                 

 Why not?

When She Sleeps

Some of you know that I have started working on a new collection, a continuation of sorts of my thesis.  I arbitrarily set a goal of ten essays about ten different subjects making up a collection that I could theoretically submit as a whole to be published, or each piece individually to journals and what not.

One of the essays, one of the subjects that I randomly made up as part of a writing prompt, is based upon my sister.

Here is short bit that I am lucky enough to have experienced first-hand while visiting her here now, in her new city, in her new life, in the wintry and chilly hills of Pennsylvania:

"When my sister sleeps, she becomes eight-years-old again.  Her face becomes flushed, her breathing slow and deliberate.  I noticed tonight, as we watched show after show on Apple TV, that just before dozing off completely, before succumbing to the pull of exhaustion that inevitably hits her each time we watch movies late into the night, that she, like a ritual, removed each of the many pieces of jewelry from her ears, fingers, wrists and neck.  And because of this, she looked much younger than she is today, she looked like the sister that I knew when we were both small, the sister that slept above me in our bunk bed, the sister that slept in the pillow forts that we made in the living room, the sister that slept on the pull-out couch in our great-grandmother's home as I watched Peter and the Dragon, the sister that I have known her whole life.  She sleeps the same as she always has.

We are blood.  And no matter the distance, no matter the new people in our lives, or the old ones that have taken so much that we sometimes feel like shells of the people that we once were, we will always have each other.  Writing this I cry quiet tears (so that I do not wake her) welling up with the love and hope and excitement for what is in store for this sleeping babe.  I only want happiness for her.  I know she only wants happiness for me.  We are the lucky ones."

Do You Have a Sister?

If you do, then you'll understand.  If you don't, I feel so sorry for you.  I may or may not have sobbed my eyes out at the last scene of the movie Warrior with Tom Hardy.  And it is approximately the fifteenth time I've watched it.  There is a moment in that movie, a significant, and important moment, when a man holds onto his brother, in a choke-hold, and tells him that he loves him, that it is ok, that he can let go.  And his brother, Tommy, taps out, gives in, and accepts the love and peace offered from his brother.  I don't care that I'm spoiling the movie for those of you that haven't seen it.  The message offered strikes so close to home that I wonder if it was written just for me, just for me and my sister, just for me, my sister, and my brother.

The love and understanding that I have for my sister is epic, it is historic, it is something that will never be diminished - only strengthened.

She knows what has happened.  She held my hand through the darkest of hours.  She knows all of my secrets, my confessions, my joys and my plummets into hell.  She has been there for me. She has held me fast.

She had never judged, she has never faltered.  She is always there with wisdom, she is always there with a sound mind, a sober countenance, a reasonable solution to any problem that I may ever encounter.  She is younger, but she is wiser.  She had done more, experienced more, said and done and felt and seen more.  She is my sister.  She is my best friend.  She is my conscience and my better judgement.  She is what no one will ever understand.  She infuriates me.  But she inspires me too.

She will always be there.  She will always have my back.  She will continue to be in my corner and get what no one else can.

Why We Write

Write what is true.  

Write so you may be clear.  

Write concisely and without frills.  Write so that you may be understood.  Write to make an impact.  Write to make them wonder.   

Write so that you may be happy.  Write so that you may maintain your sanity as well as that little part of you that is crazy for believing this can be done.

Write so that others may still feel connected to you.  Write so that you can feel like you might not someday be forgotten.

Write so you can still feel brave and vulnerable all at the same time.  Writing the truth is the scariest thing of all.  Writing the truth is giving song to your soul – it makes the unknown known, the secrets public, the quiet confessions public record. 

Write so that you are fearful you’ve written too much, and worry about it all day.  But know that writing it out may help, and it may help more than just you.

Write so that you have somewhere to let it all out.  Write so that you can say that you too are part of a creative family.  Write so that you make yourself proud. 

Write so that you may be scared of the right things.

Write so that you may no longer feel irrational fear.

Write so that you are comforted.

Write the words that only you can tell yourself.  Write the words you don’t want to hear. 

Write it all.  Write the pain.  Write the triumphs.  Write the wrongs and write the rights.  Write when there is nothing to say.  Write when there is too much, too, too much.