The Reaches of Our Sight

We are seeing stars, millions and millions of stars like specks of paint flecked onto night blue canvas in a spontaneous arrangement of particular brilliance. The North Star startlingly apparent. Understanding that the stars are actually bigger than the sun, and farther away, yet seeming close enough to touch. The stars lying over us like a blanket, colder and more foreboding than the blanket my sister cuddles at night. The star-blanket settling over us out of the depths of eternity, as it will settle over us at the end; knowing this while we are lying there admiring the beauty, and it is smothering us. 

That was what we saw the night we drove up to the dam and spread blankets on the cold hard asphalt between our parked pickup and the dam wall and lay there to admire the stars. We saw what the night wanted us to see; we could see which pinpricks of starlight the moon and the clouds had chosen to expose. We had been living in the city for too long, and our country raised souls yearned for natural light unpolluted by the bright city…for the whispering wind that dances through the trees and the leaves…for the shadowed night creatures that lurk curious and unthreatening at the reaches of our night-limited sight. It was cold and the breeze nipped at our uncovered faces. We were each cocooned in quilts to keep the frigid air from the rest of our bodies. Every few minutes a star shot across our sight in a quickly dying display of light. I wished on each and crossed my fingers for extra luck. 

On Moving Back Home After Graduation

I graduated from college two weeks with two, apparently useless, degrees: one in history and one in political science. It turns out that both are really only good for graduate school or for teaching elementary school kids who really, really want to be someplace else. And in the end it all comes back to teaching because that is also what you do after graduate school (except then you teach college students who may or may not feel the same as the younger kids). And what do you do between graduation and graduate school? 
     You move back in with your parents, apparently. Or in my case, you move back in with your parent. After four years of freedom! and living the high-life on my own, moving back in with my father has opened my eyes to things I never realized about family or about myself until now. 
     My father graciously welcomed his college-age daughter back home with open arms and free room-and-board. Both things a jobless recent college grad certainly appreciates! In return, I clean our house. And I clean it again. And I pick up the yard. Make the beds. Cook dinner. And clean some more. Because not only am I a jobless college grad, I also don’t own a car, so I have spent the greater part of the last two weeks at home all day, waiting for my father to return with the car so I can get away for an hour or two in the evenings to ride my sister’s horse. My schedule is the type of thing any intelligent person with a paying job would envy: wake up around 8, eat breakfast and leisurely drink a cup of coffee while reading, go for a run, shower, read some more. Clean the house, wash my dishes. Check my emails, follow my Tumblr, play around on Pinterest, search for jobs. Do some writing. Do some yoga. Repeat. I am stir crazy. 
    I am stir crazy, and emotional. I go through phases of intense lassitude in which I lay on the couch, emotionless, mute, relaxed. Sometimes I cry - I do not want to live in this small town where I know no one and have nothing to do outside of our house and no way to get there if I did. Then I feel a strange burst of determination: I clean the house madly, with the kind of intensity and dedication an employer would appreciate (and somehow I think this will help me find a job). Then I am bored, because I have done the same thing everyday and the monotony is killing me and it seems as if my father will never get home and then he does and we eat dinner over small talk and then he wants to go the barn with me and so I let him and then we watch a movie and then he goes to bed and then….I go to sleep too and the whole cycle repeats the next day. 
     I do not see a light at the end of the tunnel. But I do see my father, grateful for my company but anxious for me to find a paying job. I see myself slipping into this routine and losing motivation despite my best efforts, or at least, I fear that this will happen. I fight my indignation when my father wants to know everything I plan to do and where I plan to be and why! but then I realize, that he has not changed, only I have. I am used to being independent, he is used to being my father. And so I try to humor him (while resolving that I must change this situation as soon as I can). I do not want pity, and I hate the contemptible looks members of my family give me over this situation….this is not the scenario I would have foreseen four years ago, and if it was, I guarantee I would have majored in something more useful. And yet, I try to appreciate this situation for what it is and make the best of it. After all, there is a roof over my head and food on my plate and a kind companion who does care about me despite it all. 

Cracks in the Mirror

Young moms deadbeat dads dirty kids. I
Cannot get out. I am
Pinned beneath the trash and junk over my
Heart. Trailer spouts red rust through
Pipes beaten and crushed.
This is what I think of when I
think of home; what is home to you?
There is no home for me.
A house a trailer a hell; screams pierce
The night. They
Splinter my heart splinter the sky. And
 I cry. I cry. I want out
No way out for teenage girls with
Ugly babies. And I
Hold him tight because
I never wanted this for me. You know
the world was at my feet. I
Missed the train that
Other kids rode out on.
They say I can leave.
Chains on my neck my hands my feet.
Rusty black ugly dirt ugly red land ugly
House ugly life. Alcohol and cigarettes fume
Thickly down my throat. And I
I strangle in the heat.
Old-young mom rail-thin TV lighters
Got the radio on. That would never be me I
Said but when I look between
The cracks in the mirror
Who is it that I see?
You know me but I,
I cannot see the truth.