i was browsing a hardrive file i have called "assortments" and came across an old document called "randomass mental meanderings." and while that may sound lame if perhaps in a mildly interesting way, what that essentially means is its a few half-written lj entries that never came to pass. because if there's one skill ive mastered, its half-writing, a spinoff of not-writing. its almost 2 years old now, and i havent looked at it in forever. along with the aforementioned, and a very expository ramble on my love for harry potter (...yeah.) which never saw any kind of light, i found this, a kind of to-do this for summer 07:


-Explore Houdaille!
-Explore the abandoned orphanage as per Kate Stryker's wishes
-Attend 2-for-1 Mojito night at Laughlin's
-Write a BRO post that actually spurs real discussion, not just the typical bitter irrational asshats pissing and moaning about hookah and the focus of PUSH Buffalo (ok, that one was much more valid, but I wasn't entirely tied to the subject matter...)
-On that, note make it into the print edition of BR, or rather, find out WHAT even goes in there, and if its even still happening.
-Write something that's not for BRO, a snippet of fiction, a poem, fucking anything.
-Go to Crystal Beach, swim out to the pier, jump off, end the day with Lick-e-de-Split Ice Cream & Pool Toys and/or a Cappucino Glace. Have Stellastar on hand for the ride home, for nostalgia's sake.
-Go to Zoar Valley, but this time, instead of getting held up by a colon (thrilling as that was), actually make it to the waterfall, jump off.
-See the "Being Human" exhibit at the CEPA Gallery
-FINALLY get a sundae from Antoinette's

(not sure why zoar valley got all huge, but its cool.)

few things:

its nuts how far away that summer feels, yet still so close because well, it happened in buffalo, and that shit is visceral, and never, ever leaves you. i distinctly remember being on the phone with my sister right after id gotten my job at brinks and her being all excited for me that i was going to have the BEST summer ever with the combination of the 'ternship/waitressing gig, etc. i also distinctly remember having that pang that so plagues, the one of crushed expecation before the thing even begins, the inability to be in the moment because everything fits so well together but me, suddenly detached. i guess at the heart of it its fear. but while thats one way i operate, the other is nos. tal. gia. and the hugeass rose colored glasses (no really, theyd be like, the obnoxious dollar store variety, with rose-colored sequins and rose-colored glitter) with which i look at anything in the past. its part of the lost thing, part of the only-loving-what-makes-it-hard-to-love thing, an inevitable part of the deep love of travel to latin america because its hard work thing, i cant feel it fully until its gone. so that summer to me now? houuuudaille. so. satisfying. i went to brinks in the morning and wiped down and set the tables and checked the salt shakers while allison came in an apologetic flurry, freaked the eff out about something. shed make coffee and chop veggies and thank me and thank me and calm down, until we got swamped and she was freekt and near tears again til it slowed down and we ate fries at the bar and shed tell me long stories about the house and the hats and the animals and andy and i love stories, anybody's, but i could sit at listen to a Buffalo-person tell their stories all day long. id peel my condiment-stained clothes off me in the bathroom and change into real clothes for BRO, and as i left one of the cooks would inevitably make a "oooo look at you all dressed up!" comment in the totally non-creepy way of People You Work With At Restaurants, when its hard for anything they say to not have some kind of cozy feel to it, even when theyre yelling things at you or the grill, sweaty and fed up. then there was BRO which was a "clusterfuck" and a delight, keight and i nearly getting caught gchatting about geo or the bashar/nu-nu affair, that sad, sad, bowl of gum, picking anna's roo brain, making phone calls with much less fear, enjoying that sicktastic view and snazzy bathroom (nostalgia also does a bang-up job at covering up a company's total financial ineptitude and general shadiness). and there was the uniball, and the squirrel ringtone, and stellar downtown late lunches and good things. and all of this is only a shoddy peek into those 3 months.

but i look at that to-do list and get all messed up, because wait we did that but when? everything gets jumbled in a messy drawer of Buffasummers of which the best is both stacked neatly on top like old birthday cards and rolling around like inexplicable screws in the back corners. i originally looked at it and thought how nice it was that a lot of that stuff *didn't* happen that summer, that it was later, and that this was ok, and in no way took away from its total ballerness. but i was wrong because houdaille and zoar valley did in fact go down then and Summer 07 really did Have it All. but i never did quite write like that bullet asked for, and despite the fact that i spent an inordinate amount of time researching and writing my weather museum piece, "real discussion" is debatable. and i STILL have never had an antoinette's sundae. but to-do lists are never quite for the doing. and sometimes a summer rolls along like this one, and you check things off in all the right ways, you go to bonnaroo and see your name in something kind of like print and fall in love with your friends all over again still and feel the calumet patio warping under the weight of a zillion people dancing their limbs off to chromeo soaked in summersweat and things just, work. especially when you can love them in that inimitable way saved only for missing. and you don't do it all, but you do enough, and the lists fall away into new ones, constant ones, ones you cross off and build up so you can live them and fear them and store them, live them again in a way that is quiet and certain, less conscious than breathing even, but just as much a part of your living.


and whenever i find myself in the buff this summer, i am GETTING that antoinette's sundae.

this week, or rather what has become last, is always a weird one. we wait for it and countdown to it and in november we are in awe of its possibililty, in february its proximity. what do you mean there is a time when we sleep past six and don't spend five hours of the day at the pool? when is this time when saturdays are of our own design and we are not always so. tired. the last two weeks are spent lusting after indulgences like coffee and cookies and being able to walk up stairs without guilt or slip on ice without having a full body freakout as you catch yourself and think no no no not now not with a week left. and then it comes and then its gone and you land with some kind of thud and whoops-we-plowed-through-14-bottles-of-champagne-with-ease-yesterday fuzziness in monday and its like, oh. oh. so this is it? and this one was of course, the Big It, the rest of our lives, dramatically speaking. this is walking across the bulkhead saturday night flowers in hand as we wave back at a  beaming mass of orange while the rest of the team disappears behind cameras and cheers and beneath all that blurred applause someone says something about the class of 2009 and were all shit, its really us. this is stepping up on the blocks at finals for the 500, then the 4 IM, and finally for that godforsaken mile and knowing they will all be the last.

it was sunyacs like no other, thats for damn sure. c.b. dubbs was on hand as an athletic director and constant source of smiles and miraculous shoulder massages, but no longer as a coach. the crazyass blue seventy and several crazyass swimmers, many of them our own, rewrote the record book. somehow, my taper missed the mark, and i arrived in the buff with a nagging ache in my legs that no amount of mental toughness could shake. i dove in for my races and most of my body said no. i swam my way to best times, even if some only tied them, and scored in everything, but with a sinking, painful feeling that this wasn't my time. that for whatever reason i hurt like mid-season and with maybe a little more rest or a little more something, id be flying, and despite the hardest and perhaps best training of my life, it wasn't going to quite come together. that this wasn't the swimmer i could really, really be and that now, i might not ever find out. it hit me like a punch in the stomach each time and i fell apart anew. i lost sight, like i always do, of every other part of me and sobbed into the warm down pool as tiff held my hand, wept into my mom's shoulder when she found me after the mile and let coach (because he will never be brian) watch me sniffle back to life as he (again) put together the mess he's watched this sport make of me for four years. "25 percent," he said, making me look into his eyes. the number of ncaa athletes who begin a sport their freshman year and actually make it through four. he reminded me of all the things i need to be reminded of, and i was fine (again). "i know you, and even if you got out of that pool with whatever time you'd had in your head, you wouldn't have been satisfied"  it was my release he said, and like my mom said it gave me  "a chance to grieve" the loss of what has been a pretty enormous part of nearly 12 years of my life. i got perspective, got myself together, and soaked up another sunyacs of all of us cheering each night by way of nearly throwing ourselves off our bleachers sweating and becoming a mosh pit as we looked up at the clock and screamed til there was no voice left and swear we'd lost a pound. we hugged tightly and loved and moved and joked and ranted like the family we are. we ate too much and laughed the way only we do and described in detail the daunting task of shoving your ass into a racing suit and danced across the pool deck and wondered what the housekeeping staff would think when they found bloody towels each day because uh, shavings hard when you're out of practice, whoops. i searched the stands for whit, total BPE, and craig yax and found them and the pre-race knot that runs through me loosened and her being there is what ill always remember, the outcome of that swim be damned. i read letters from the coaches and girls that make it all worthwhile, watched my dad get weepy day after day and watched my mom play hostess with the mostest and watched the hawk parents become a (never again to be upstaged by oswego) wave of fierce and wonderful orange. my parents and i couldnt stop being proud of each other, and all of us that last night, as the whole mixed crowd of the hawk fam clustered around pizza and wing boxes and tried to delay our trip back with constant hugging, were in some way unstoppable.

"after everyone had left i just went out there, to the empty stands and just sat , looking down at the pool, and i thought, man, 11 years, we've had some good times here, man." my dad's eyes filled and re-filled and i struggled as always to be present, to share his ability to do this when i tend to lazily wait for nostalgia, unable to process the weight of the moment. i walked towards the front door and while waiting for sam, looked towards the ceiling like i never will in the same way again and for one second it all hit me in that cinematic way that it should, before we squeezed on the bus, sure we'd do this forever. "it hasn't hit us yet" was and still is our go-to answer when asked what it's like to be done. when it will happen i dont know, but i know that when i said i wouldn't be "done" if i didnt swim in college i was right, because "done" feels even harder to grasp than ever. what i won't miss is inextricably tied to what a will in a nutso sport that requires a love made from a kind of hate that thrives on pain and pushing further, harder. the this-is-why-i-do-this feeling of floating on my back during the warm down that follows a 15,000 yard day is nothing without the fuck-my-life feeling of each morning. the nearly existentialist freakouts of my junior year when i wondered what it meant, what i was even DOing slide into the conviction that there is too much undeniable good here to mean nothing. four years. of ALL of that. we did it, i did it. and now ill make the clunky transition into my post-swimming life like i always do, learn to fill up the new, free time and let any lingering regret fade into my happily revisionist memory, weightless as the water.
 

WHO

My mother in faded pink, my favorite, my small sleepy head on the rhythm of her worn cotton. My sister who looks at me when I am born and says I could never be ugly. Sheila my second grade teacher who matches Reebok high-tops to her outfit each day. My bus aide Miss Betty who gives us candy that  tastes like soap. A man with frighteningly large nostrils who works at the neighborhood convenient  store and tells me I will be a cashier when I grow up. Camp counselors who I want to be and first friends and friends who are not friends but hard-eyed girls who collect rules like Barbies. My first best friend who lives across the street but goes to a new school and disappears into a pack of new girls in matching plaid skirts. Every girl I wanted to become. The girl I became, and lost. And found, and  lost. Boys I run from who gave smiles and burned CDs. Anonymous French Canadian men who help me up the icy trail of my first Adirondack high peak. Customs workers and toll workers and tour guides. Ipod, a homeless man who will sing any song for a dollar. Swim teams and writing classes and people whose names I paper clip and file each day, inventing their lives. Della, a woman who sits next to me on a flight to Philadelphia and tells me she is a prophet. A sad man on a New York City subway who tells my friend I have “a beautiful back.” The wispy-haired airline clerk who barrels down silent gray carpet with me, ushering me on to a flight I should have missed, shaking her head as she tells me she didn’t think I was going to make it. A high school teacher who tells me we bloom where we are planted and dies just before I turn twenty. A man whom I only see from behind, his muscled back dusty and  tan  in the heat of a summer musical festival, a paper grocery bag atop his head with a bumper sticker stuck on that reads “Live the life you love.” Men with strong arms and stronger accents who pull me from the churn of whitewater, and do not ask or advise, only help. Professors who push me and swim coaches who know me and people who get it. New friends from English classes who feel like more than old friends and sit in doorframes and  hold me while I cry without warning. My father, his eyes still and serious when he tells me he loves me.

WHEN

1987. When I was two, and cried every time I was dropped off at preschool. The year pneumonia stung my lungs and when we finally left the hospital and all I wanted was the strawberry pop tarts we normally weren’t allowed to eat . The year we took our “family fall foliage” trip and I proclaimed that I “felt fun  there.” Early spring, when I thought yellow tights underneath green shorts with pink high tops were all I needed. When I tried to learn cursive and failed and wept without sound for the lost words. The year I learned how girls worked (and was terrified.) Third grade and I start ice skating. Fifth and I quit for swimming. When I sat alone in my room and moved my arm or foot or self a certain way and imagined that maybe somewhere in the world someone or no one was doing the same. When the house was always too cold and I sat on the worn wood until the heat vent roared and warmed  my face. The year I wrote stories and was certain it was all I would ever want to do. When my pet turtle died on my birthday. The time just before a sleepover or birthday party when I convinced  myself there was nothing to be excited about, and was numb with the small horror of nothingness. 1999 and I am twelve and we pack a neighbor’s house and I drink slow champagne from a mug and wait for the lights to go off. When I thought I liked boy bands and blue eye shadow. When I sat at the end of the row on middle school movie outings. 10 minutes after I needed to be awake. When I wore cargo pants and wanted to be liked. When I baked Christmas cookies with their names in icing and was. September 2001, it’s serious when swim practice is canceled. When the sky was never bluer. When I wanted to kiss you for a year. When I did and hated it. Much too late at night. The moment  before someone takes a sip of their drink, pausing to say something too important to be swallowed. When it is still very dark and I am bitterly awake, wanting only sleep, hating everything. When the water is all I need.  Always.  2008.

WHERE

The space between the dresser and  the wall, where it is safe. In the car on the way to grandma’s house, asleep every time. Under the dining room table, furtively scratching my chicken pox. In the “reading corner” I made each time I rearranged my small room with layers of blankets and crates of books. Not at my grandfather’s funeral because I am too young. The stump where we invented in jungles of ivy and sang  loudly, unaware that anyone could hear. Past unused suitcases and stray sweaters in the back of Mom’s closet to my secret place. Creaking bunk beds at summer camp shared with girls who share my name and laughter during the best two weeks of the year. Wherever my feet can tuck under something. Ski lifts in winter silence and awkward silence and this pool and that pool and attics and near big windows and on canvas chairs in the library that made sitting more like laying down. In Lake Erie where we are mermaids then Olympians then  nervous girls with boys from down the beach. In my grandma’s dining room eating thawed pie made by my now dead great grandmother when she was alive as if this is not strange. Too in my head, always. In the car to escape my parents’ fights, hoping that if we drive away from the moment it will be gone. The unnamed place my mother went after these fights, to look at the trees. Vacant grain elevators at sunrise, laughing heads circled on top of asphalt poked by a bramble of weeds. In strangers houses learning lives from facts. Anywhere we are. Beneath the Christmas tree, warm and  looking up into the blinking dazzle of pine. The space across my parents bed that watches with me, just as silent, as they stand on either side each evening and trade stories of their day. The driveway my mother walks down after surgery while my father holds her waist and I watch from the window , forget to breathe.  On line for kegs and cheering alongside flip cup tables and on top of tables learning to properly be a mess. In the backs of dark bars kissing boys without faces and on pillows alone and heavy with the dull fuzzy light of morning. On the floor by the speakers listening to our small voices. Thrown into rapids in Baños, tossed at the whim of the water, my head inches from rocks or something worse. Crowded backseats of cars. Bathroom stalls. On my bike. Buffalo, Buffalo. Canada when we are 19.  The Dive. The five of us collapsed on top of each other, but never sleeping before watching a building downtown implode at dawn. Around campfires and on muddy trails and sprawled on to summits with a peanut butter bagel, finally grateful. In mirrors thinking maybe I am beautiful, in mirrors picking it all apart into ugly wordless bits. Walking down train tracks towards Machu Picchu in the dark because we cannot afford the Inca Trail. A place I have made mine own.

HOW

With many cups of tea.  In two minutes.  Never fast enough. Quietly. While talking too much, talking not enough, not at all.  Like a tough cookie. Like a wimp. Carefully, recklessly, one practice at a time. With my legs and arms and feet and hands when they are all I have.  Like it matters, like I care, like today will be different. Putting it off til the last brutal seconds. Wondering if I am good enough smart enough well enough. Anxious and worried and always inventing. With the faces of strangers and their lives for comfort. With a song in my head like a narrative. Narrating and dissecting and making too much of it. Like this is the first time I’ve done it. Faking it. Bullshitting. Honest and true but never together, flustered. Put together, but always a mess. With awkward haircuts and worse silences. Taking lots of notes. Bruised and freckled and without the right hair product.  Like I am running late for a plane I will miss anyway. With strong legs and nerves like fire. With a lot of tissues and power naps and phone calls to my sister that our breathless and always end too fast.  In dresses in the winter because there are worse things than cold. Like I am on the edge, in the middle,  nowhere I  know.

WHY

Because I always care even when I don’t. Because when you pet a dog’s ears it’s all you can think about. Because coffee always works. Because you work. Because I read anything and edit everything. Because I can’t walk by a gumball machine without stopping. Because I believed you. Because the hum of a school bus idle and waiting for parents to appear can be the saddest noise a bright afternoon will ever know. Because we all want it. Because last night I wanted to do work and instead we made cookies and drank too much wine and laughed even more and sang along to Christmas carols in ugly echoes that woke the neighbors. Because when you  lose power you see what you miss. Because there is always something to miss. Because we all find ways to fill in the holes. Because I dance in my seat on airplanes in a way no one sees. Because I see what you see and in this way we know each other even when we do not. Because it matters to someone. Because words work. Because words are all we have even when they are nothing. Because when I read a good book I want to rip out the pages and give them to everyone. Because books. Because there are not enough pages and  there is not enough time. Because we will always have pages and time. Because before anything begins I think about the ending. Because I’ll think, I will never get there but when I do I won’t believe I was ever here. Because we are all here. Because when I came back to the US after seven weeks in South America, the woman who stamped my passport said “Welcome home!” and meant it. Because when you cook a good dinner you think you can do anything. Because maybe you can. Because you know you can’t and do it anyway. Because I know now it is all in the doing. Because little boys hold red flowers out of car windows and tell me “This is for my Mom!” Because I am crazy in the same way that you are. Because there is no such thing as sane. Because  ice cream is necessary. Because apple trees look sinister in the spring. Because we pile on beds and hunch over computer screens and talk until there is no breath left. Because I am scared and always want to do better. Because I will never be done. Because good days can start at the post office. Because other runners smile at you as they pass. Because I cry when it isn’t worth it and never when I should. Because tears still have a worth. Because it hurts. Because if we can make each other hurt we are doing something right. Because there is so much to be done. Because we can make. Because we.  Because we cannot do it all now, or tomorrow.  Because all.

"A reader writes:

The Couric interview reminded me of an episode in the 5th grade when I tried to fake my way through an oral presentation on a book I hadn’t read.  Neither of us pulled it off."