College Students! discussion

Please feel free to share your writing here.

Some of my writing from a few years ago. I hate that I don't write anymore.

1. I sat in a crowd of people that for the most part I did not really know, and never would, and I thought about you. Is it always going to be true that the simplest realizations burst in on my brain like a symphony?

2. Here's all it was: we'll both change, mostly in tiny ways, like the ways you regrow your skin. Tiny bits of you are always reforming--your hair creeps outward, blood is constantly being cleaned each time it circulates your body, your lungs are always rebuilding themselves. How long until we are entirely different people than who we started out to be? (a week maybe?)

3. But it doesn't matter, I decided, because what I know is, you are not disposable. Frustration, misunderstanding, poor communication skills, I can't think of anything that would make me not want to know you, and that is a new relief.

4. I will be sad. Too much time. "Indecision massacre", I will call it. I will remember.

5. I used to beg for time, crave it, brag about all I could get done if I had enough of it. With enough time I could learn to play guitar, learn to understand people, learn to do things right. I was lying-let's say bluffing, it's gentler.

6. Too much time is anchors and bricks and all things heavy, taking me deeper, farther away from where my body would like best to be--alive, breathing deeply. Too much time is something you crave only when you don't have it.

7. I have news for you, my brain, my fear, my lazy hands. There will be no more waste. We are climbing out of this, and we are climbing out now and.

. 8. Well. That is all.


or..


this is the way endings always come; abrupt and unmindful of what might become
of a future tense like those sharp-cornered engravings left on public picnic tables, that love-made with a knife on a old twisting tree.
haughty, as if a word would outlive wood,
haughty, as if a boy and a girl might outlive a word and -these are the things i think about when
my head is in opposition with my heart and i can picture a million different endings in media res, guided by perspective, guided by hope, grounded with the past, a gasp at how quickly a memory can fade without fuel to feed it.

I should not have come to Boudha during the afternoon.
The tourists are everywhere. They watch me as I do kora
around the stupa; do they think I don’t know English?
One even takes my picture as I prostrate as their
fast-talking guide gives them misinformation.
A dog has died, its corpse lies unmoved.
Someone partially covered it
with a newspaper pinned down by a brick. The flies
are massive and it has no eyes. The tourists take
its picture and it is then I understand that sometimes
we might as well have no eyes, for we cannot truly see.

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“Sim-jang-nang-go,” I bid the old Tibetan man.

“What is that?” my new friend asks me. Both alone, we were seated at the same table.

“It’s ‘goodnight’ in Tibetan.”

We’re standing in the street of Thamel. We won’t see each other again, ever, and it’s a fact we both accept.

“Well, let me bid you goodnight in French,” he says, kissing each of my cheeks in turn.

“Wanna know how we say goodnight in American?” and before he can answer, I grab his face and press my lips against his.

“Goodnight!” I exclaim, running towards my guesthouse, in the wrong direction.

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The only thing left of my home was a leaky faucet, under which Papa would clean the blood off his hunting knife and Mama would wash out her long, black hair.

They would have heard it when they stormed in, when our absence became noticed. A soft drip onto concrete, just outside the kitchen.

The thing about a leaky faucet is that a water drop, insignificant on its own, if collected over time, can fill buckets, bathtubs, oceans.

We’ve been trickling down from the mountains for 50 years.

Amassing, expanding, flung to all corners of the world.

And we’re ready.

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I liked, and hated, Nyima. I hated his attitude towards women, towards me. It was sadistic. He made me feel like a sexual object and nothing more. He wasn't one of those guys who wouldn't pretend to actually care about you; his advances felt empty and cold. I think that was part of the attraction: I had never been liked like that before, so cold, carnal. And I could easily string him along, playing a sick sort of cat and mouse game where I was never sure if I was the cat, or the mouse.

Or if it even mattered.