“‘There’s a unicorn in the garden,’ he said. ‘Eating roses.’”
                -James Thurber, “The Unicorn in the Garden”

                Over the last few days, I’ve been helping set up my partner’s new apartment. On Saturday we came into empty rooms. Now there’s a bed, a table with the tools to make cookies. A chair there, she decides, and now it could be a reading nook. Empty rooms—the kind of empty when you’re just moving in, or leaving, vacuuming the floors to get back your security deposit—always surprise me a little. Their shape changes. Their space changes: it’s bigger, or smaller, somehow. Or maybe it’s me changing inside them.
                Last Friday we started driving from Illinois to Massachusetts. The space of the car changed: confining, constricting, but also opening. The space of the sky breathed, larger and quieter and more alive, and I watched a ‘window’ in the clouds. I wonder how long it was. Ten miles? Twenty? A hundred? The sun came up, burning on the edge of the clouds, and I shaded my hand trying to watch. On a long drive I feel like I’m moving so fast. On a long drive I feel like I’m not moving at all.
                I wonder how many of my thoughts are built on where I’m thinking. “Safety” means something, here, using this mattress as a desk while I sit on the floor. It means something else in a tent in the mountains. It means something else, floating on my back in the ocean, and something else in a classroom, and something else when a professor took my class outside and we sat on the steps, watching leaves fall. I lay down on the floor. I stand at the window. I wash dishes, and the water becomes a place, remembering the place it came from. I step outside, beneath branches and blowing leaves. There’s a whisper in the living room. There’s a rest on the front steps. There’s a unicorn in the garden, eating roses.

                “It’s not a piece about silence. It’s putting parentheses around all the sounds you hear in the world.”
                -Professor Jorge Lucero on John Cage’s composition, 4’33”, in which the musician does not play for four minutes and thirty three seconds.

                I used to wonder why doing things seemed so central to connecting. In college I learned to play pool because I was looking for friends, and “want to play pool?” seemed more socially acceptable than “want to get to know each other?” On breaks I’d come home, and it was often in going for a hike in the hills or a swim at the beach, or in cooking a meal together, that I’d really start reconnecting with my family.
                This semester I have a weekly game group that meets in the park, Saturdays from 12-2. We don’t always play our game: sometimes we make maple leaf roses, because one of us knew how to do that, and then there was the day we watched a hawk in the wind. We talk about history, or dance, and the way we put movements together. We sit in the grass. It’s lovely. And then last week it was less lovely, and for a really silly reason. I had my phone with me. Usually I put it away in my backpack. With it in my hand, I checked my work email. I opened Wizards Unite. I followed the conversation, mostly, but I didn’t watch people’s faces or run my fingers through the grass.
                Until then, twelve and two had been parentheses. They’d held open a space. You could call that space two hours, or you could call it walking ants and smiling friends and following someone through her wonders until they were our wonders.
                Sitting in the park my friend grinned at me. I guess you could say their grin, their attention to the moment, started playing 4’33”. I put my phone in my backpack, zipped the pocket closed, and they held up a leaf. Orange and yellow, blending between the two. They let it go and the wind carried it.

                “Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”
                -Mark Haddon

                Lately I’ve been reading and re-reading Ocean Vuong, and as I do, it occurs to me that my time away from the book is as much a part of reading as my time looking at the pages. Reading is when a line of his floats back to me, and I share it in conversation. Reading is when he mentions buffalo, and I remember my own camping trip with a buffalo, and I imagine, buffalo. Reading is Ocean Vuong, reaching into the world, participating, noticing and wondering and opening to how he’s being touched. It’s me reaching back. It’s more off the page then on it.
                I wonder if anything is really just one thing. One of my friends is planning a long trip that will take her away from her partner. When I mentioned that, she said, “Yeah, but that’s part of being together.” Missing each other. Being apart. Michael Chabon, in writing about being a father, says (I’m paraphrasing from memory) every minute of exhaustion and every wiped smear of poop is a kind of intimacy. It’s not that being a father isn’t shiny birthday moments: it’s just so many other things, too. My friend is “working on his book” when he’s at the page, writing. But if you want to understand “writing,” he says, then he’s also “writing” when he’s swimming through the same emotional turmoils as his characters. He’s writing when he’s sitting there, feeling stuck and not stopping. He’s writing when he’s resting. And if he just sat at the page putting words after each other, he wouldn’t get very far.
                I once helped someone build a human-powered vehicle for a festival in Santa Rosa. When humans powered it, we put so much torque on the central driveshaft that the three-quarter-inch metal sheared straight through. We stood around, impressed by how much power we were playing with. We ran our fingers over the break’s smooth fracture. The lead designer went back to his plans and started scribbling new ideas. We ate lunch. And all of that, all of that, was building the contraption that, the next day, could carry us.

                “Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good […] the end of medicine is health, that of shipbuilding, a ship, that of military science, victory, and that of domestic economy, wealth.” -Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

                Here’s something I said recently: “This summer was about revising my book.” It seemed to make sense when I was saying it. I mean, I did spend a lot of time writing. But the statement also reflects a way of looking at the world, a way I think I put together from the Nicomachean Ethics. And it’s not a way I like.
                The Ethics suggests that all actions aim at some “good,” some end that we want. I take medicine for good health. I go to the grocery store to get food. It suggests that lots of ends are steps along the way to something else: eating and medicine are both part of having a body that can wander around and explore and meet people in parks to talk. When I read the Ethics for the first time, I read it as constructing a pyramid: everything I was doing, all the lines I was drawing, led up to some point. Some peak. Some final good that is the measure of living well. The Ethics sets out to find that peak so we know what we’re aiming for.
                Here’s something else I could say about the summer: it was warm, and humid sometimes. I met people. Lost touch with others. I wrote toward a book, and visited muskrats, and read lots of graphic novels. I started volunteering online. I laid in the grass, too hot in the sun, and cooled by the breeze. I listened to music I’d never heard before, and after all my dance lessons last year, I felt that music moving. (That’s a surprise for me. Often I’ve just felt frozen). What if, instead of building toward the point of a pyramid, we scattered like the twigs and leaves of a tree? Instead of looking for the one task, one central Good, what if we each tried to be deeply, directly involved with as many of this fall’s falling leaves as we could? The Ethics is built on hierarchies: shopping for groceries, groceries for a meal, a meal for a nourished body, a nourished body for some other aim. But there’s something wonderful in shopping itself, in chatting with the checker and seeing all the onions. In cooking there’s the snap of the oil when I drop the onions in. In a step, the wave of a hand, there’s a fluid solidity that used to sometimes hold me with its symphony. Instead of this for this for this, I want to try this and this and this. I want to try to be involved with different moments. What if each moment, each on its own, is a breath to breathe deeply?

“If I wait a day or two something will happen, something will change…”
                -Chris Glomski, poet, in a reading at UIUC

“When?”
“Soon, Toad. Soon.”
                -A Year With Frog and Toad

                When I start wanting, I do a lot of wanting things to happen. I do a lot of wanting things to happen now. I want to finish editing Chapter 6 of my novel. I want to know what I’ll do after grad school. I want to find a thought in these words, clever and quick and maybe even a little funny. As a kid I used to lie in bed all eager for the morning’s breakfast. Especially if it was gonna be cereal and milk. As a kid I couldn’t stand not understanding. I really liked math, but I remember clutching my head like my palms could meet in the middle, staring at some equation and the paper where I’d already scribbled and erased and scribbled and erased and scribbled. And erased. I thought I had to figure it out. Now.
                Soon, Toad. Soon.
                Somewhere in my mid twenties, I was hit with the idea that I might never find my big answers. I studied philosophy in undergrad, puzzling out different ethical systems and how they worked. I might never finally understand which one makes the most sense to me, or how to hold a number of them, balanced against each other. I’ll never read all the things I meant to read, have all the conversations I meant to have, get to know all the people I’d like to share the years with. When I first had that thought, that image of a path that wasn’t leading to a clean end, it shook me. Better get listening. Better get meeting. Trying to finish.
                There are other things to do. Toad’s planting seeds. Chris Glomski’s writing poems. There’s still a big part of me that would like to be certain, that would like to decide or know, but these two remind me to look down at the dirt. Look here. Seedlings. Changes. Another identity to try as I look for the equation’s derivative. A sip of water, or the pull of hunger. With television series (especially ones I only half like), I can be the kind of viewer who looks up spoilers, who checks when that awful character will finally get shuffled along. I remember being bored when my family went out to watch the sunrise, because I was cold, because it happened so slowly, because I hadn’t wanted to wake up so early. Now, imagining it, I wonder what I might have heard in the early morning. Wonder at the texture of the shadows around me, as they went from a close blurred blanket to a sharp hard edge. I’m even happy to think of my goosebumps, and the warmth that’s coming, slowly, and the sky, shade by shade, shade by shade, so imperceptibly and so completely I’ll be wondering about it twenty-two years later.

                “I would hope that readers…approach the book, read it, and—not necessarily take anything away, you know, not possess anything, but perhaps just more of themselves. They could see more of themselves in the book, and they could carry that and—and—and participate in more parts of their lives than before.” -Ocean Vuong, when asked “What is your hope for readers with this book?”

                “If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin.” -Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

                Here’s a funny thing that happens these days: I sit in a room, flicking back and forth between my computer and my phone, pausing Netflix, eating a little, poking idly at some task for work, and hours collapse without much. They close like a book I didn’t start reading. Here’s another thing that happens: I run off to the park, maybe a few minutes late because it’s weirdly feeling harder to be punctual. I walk across the grass, wave to a friend, and we sit under a tree. We smile. And even just twenty minutes opens wide and green, a leaf well suited to drinking in the sun.
                Ocean Vuong helps me understand why. He makes me want to write a book, like he wrote a book, to reach out toward my mother. And another toward my father, more to each of my brothers, my friends. He reminds me, in the meantime, to pick up the phone and call. Past that, to focus on the call, the words and silences, instead of fumbling my hands with washing dishes or folding laundry. When I was invited to take a job halfway around the world, and didn’t know what to do, I wrote a little. I wrote my confusion, my muddy thoughts, looking for a sentence that ended somewhere I could begin. When I was struggling with someone I love, I wrote again: a loose page of my hurts and hopes, looking for a way through the brambles. Looking for where to start.
                The art I make, or hold, the philosophy I wander through, the board games I play, the conversations I have—I wonder how much of all that is looking for where I can begin. Once I look at a tree I can see its branches, pulled full like a pair of breathing lungs. Once I’m listening to a friend it’s easier to hear. These days some struggles—how to connect, how to help move toward more compassionate systems; even where to live—can start feeling impossible. Impassible. Without a start. And so, says Ocean Vuong, we listen, sing, dance, watch. Write.
                “If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin.”

                “…and a third woman whom I recognized, though I was also positive I’d never seen her before.”
                -Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body And Other Parties

                I’ve been wondering what comes next: visualize it, and all that. See the steps. But if the world is an ocean we wade out into, the nighttime swells like quiet dreams, then maybe sometimes we can’t see what’s inside until we’re swimming.
                Machado’s line plays with a sweet little contradiction. In the last years, as I’ve moved from place to place, I’ve often ended up “recognizing” someone I don’t know. Sometimes it’s a certain person: that’s Mike, that’s Michi, that’s Sasha, my memory making the glimpse of a face into the face of a friend. Sometimes I’ve even run to catch up, and realized, no—though it was always unlikely that Shreya from Rishi Valley in Andhra Pradesh would be walking along this street in Illinois. Unlikely but not impossible: my mind jumps back, snapping like a rubber band around the shape of what I might find. Sometimes it’s not a certain person, just a general sense—the man over there would be like this. Like that. Like someone I’ve seen before. ‘Recognize’ itself comes from to know again. There’s something sweet in this moment of ‘seeing’ an old friend, and I like how it opens me up to the world. Then again, ‘seeing’ Shreya’s face isn’t seeing whoever’s there. Maybe we can’t see past a surprise.
                This week I read two stories by fellow MFAs. In both of them, the moment of transformation came at the very end. That’s not the traditional form: the “usual” arc involves a resolution, a glimpse of what happens after. The Death Star blows up: the Rebels join to celebrate. Chewbacca roars. That gives us an idea of where we’re going, of where we’ve come. What about changes so subtle, so complete, that they lead us to a surface we can’t see past? What about friends who can’t be known again, but only met for the first time? I like stories that imagine something new. I like stories that open up a road, and bring me into another world. I think I also like stories that imagine so much newness that they can only bring me to the shore, the sea, can only breathe me out for one moment above the waves. One jump, one fall. In a moment I hope the water will open, in a moment

                “I certainly never fantasied about a radiant future where I was paid to perform an economic role.”
                -Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends

                Until I read that, I’d never thought about my future without fantasizing some economic role. At least, I hadn’t since I was very young—hadn’t for so long that I barely remember asking how will I be in the world without adding and what job will I have. It’s strange to see how much I’ve adopted performing an economic function into my idea of being. I have more questions. More and more questions. Then again, just having them helps me with something I’ve been struggling with—something about trying to “work,” or at least help and engage, when my efforts are channeled through existing social systems that feel broken.
                Here’s an example: I wholeheartedly believe in people supporting other people as we grow. I’ve felt what it’s like to be planted in a community that gave me soil. I’ll keep drawing from that soil, if I didn’t I would whither, but I want to help tend it, too. That’s part of why I’m a teacher. Then again, I only mostly believe in “teaching:” our American conception of “students” and “teachers” includes dynamics of power, control, and hierarchy that trouble me. The form of our “learning” presses us toward some ways of knowing, some ways of being, and away from others. What’s with all the classrooms? Where are our outsides? I’m even more troubled when it comes to many specific classes, situated as they are in academic sequences and intellectual “departments” that separate thought into different silos with their own strange histories. And for that matter, separate think from feel. Then there’s the institution itself, and I have more and more questions about access, economics, history, prejudice, standardization, Student Learning Outcomes, and opening up during a pandemic. Where I end up can feel far from where I thought I started. I think most of us want to help. I think it can get confusing what helping means, and more confusing when the water we carry goes into canals that already exist.
                As far as I can tell, Rooney doesn’t have an answer. I certainly don’t. I’ve heard some suggestions: you do the best you can, you keep your dream close while making the compromises you must and work toward slow change. Or else you decide the system (the company that has hired you; or education, capitalism, factory farms, the clothing industry, transportation, and on, and on) is too broken, and you try to step away. I don’t find either of those satisfying. I see the wall I’ve come to, this strange wall between me and what I’d thought was possible, and I don’t see a way through it. Then again, if I tilt my head, even not seeing feels hopeful. Maybe it takes time. Maybe it takes all sorts of answers, playing back and forth together. Dreaming and engaging; dreaming and engaging. Whatever else, I think it takes noticing, and Rooney calling me to a stop. Here I am, surprised, looking at this wall I’ve felt in front of me and still somehow so often missed. Ah, yes; all this isn’t what I’d hoped. I don’t know what’s next. And here I am.

“I can read a text in anything—
                        to read a body is to break
                                   that body a little. What I mean:
                                                           
                        When my desert reads a life out-loud, it takes
                 the body down, back to its dirt, one symbol at a time—
                       drinking the blue milk of an eye, a wasted tongue
           
                             pulled back down the throat, a vertebra
                                    unlocked and dragged under.
                                                The body after itself,
                                                     the after-body, become banquet”
                                                -Natalie Diaz, “cascabel”

                Pull yourself together, we say. You look so put together. I’ve been trying to put myself together.
                There’s a whole group of Western philosophy problems playing with the identity of separable things. If I take one fistful of dirt from the pile in your yard, is it still the pile? You say ‘yes,’ and I get all gleeful: what about two fistfuls, or three, or thirty-three, because eventually there won’t be any dirt in the pile. Where’s the line? And lots of things are separable. When I run my fingers over the brickwall I leave some cells behind—am I still “me”? Back at Amherst College, it wasn’t long before some student felt all clever and retreated to “mereological essentialism”—you are only you if you have every last one of your parts. Reading Diaz, listening to the poem instead of trying to hold fast to some rational line in the sand, instead of looking for the pure essential “me,” I wonder if I’m the thing that’s being changed. I’m the body that’s scratched and carried away, that eats and carries with, that breathes in and then back out. When her “desert reads a life out-loud,” maybe we’re all that kind of changing thing.
                I went for a walk and wondered what “personal moment” from my life I could talk about in this piece, to help explain why Diaz’s lines reverberate so much. I found some possibilities. This: when I go into the ocean I try to feel the ocean, not just my skin. Or this: I slide my hands across rough brick walls, trees, stones, feeling their texture. I want to feel myself read-aloud. Or this: I once started hiking at midnight with my older brother so we could watch sunrise from a peak. We got to the peak hours too early, and laid down, cold now that we weren’t moving, to watch the clouds rise up around us until the peak was an island in the fog. Rise higher until the island was washed away, and we didn’t see the sunrise. I didn’t read that moment right, didn’t get to the end I meant to, but I think the moment read me.
                As I thought about those moments, they all seemed to work, and none of them seemed to say what I meant. Maybe that’s because they’re all moments of me. Think, instead, of the ocean with its salt, the bricks with their late heat, the peaks with its weathering stones. The desert “takes / the body down, back to its dirt.” What if that’s not an undoing of the body, the dirt, the desert: what if that’s what body, dirt, desert does?

                “I worry that as contemporary poets we have this pressure to always be moving forward. To always be elliptical and surge ahead, for every line to floor us with the unexpected word or image or turn.”
                -Max Ritvo, in a Divedapper interview

                I’m on-and-off terrified of spiders. The hydraulics of their legs. Their stillness that’s also movement about to happen. I held a tarantula at the Entomologist Graduate Student Association’s bug petting zoo. It was so cool, so itself and other and familiar, and also, when it stepped onto my hand, about as big as my hand, I could feel adrenaline washing down inside my skin. I’m scared of falling behind, too: scared I’ll stop forever if I don’t keep moving forward. Scared I won’t find that line that floors you, floors me: that gives me a floor to stand on so I can turn around and say, aha, we’re here.
                Earlier this month I went out to the river. I sat beside it, not thinking about spiders or moving forward, pretending I wouldn’t get wet because I hadn’t brought a bathing suit. Then I went out and sat in the water. I laid down, the little current pulling past me, the littler fish nibbling arms and legs and sides. I was with my friend, and we talked. We talked and talked, and listened, and sat in the water. We stayed, the day and our conversation and our fears and our joys and our hopes washing along us. Later that night, lying in bed, I thought back to some plays I’ve helped put on: the sawdust and the paint, the legs we screwed onto platforms, the actors on the new set, practicing, stumbling, running over their lines like they’re counting seeds with their tongues.
                My friend Erin told me she “wanted to unlearn beauty.” In her writing, she’s gotten all tied up trying to write varying sentences and balanced phrases. Whatever narrative or character or worldview is actually to move through the page, through the moment, it gets tripped up on the rules of “beautiful.” The expectations of moving forward. Somehow I’ve started writing scared: trying to make sure I’m not messing anything up, not fumbling my lines, not showing my audience more of the seams and wood glue than the set and the characters. But a play is also a rush of impudent joy, isn’t it? It’s the childlike dream of this, the mature thought of maybe. We learn by practicing, we walk along the river again and again to learn what’s there, but I think I’ve been building too many dams and not letting enough water flow. Enough water go. I have my fears of the spiders’ legs, but I also have the dream of its weaving, and it has the pull of its own sharp living. That’s why I went to the bug petting zoo in the first place.