“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.

                “Oh, I don’t like this bit at all. We can’t progress to next week with all of you, sadly, so I’m really, really sorry to say that the person who won’t be coming with us next week is…”
                -Mel Giedroyc on The Great British Baking Show (Collection 3, Episode 7)

                Earlier today I thought, “I wish I could go outside.” Last month I told myself, “I wish I could be seeing my friends more.” Last October, I told a friend, “I’d like to find someplace around here to volunteer.” 
                “No you don’t,” he said. “If you wanted to you could just do that. Like that would literally take a minute.”
                Plenty of things are outside my control. All the same, it’s funny how I take my experience of the world and write down these rules, and then assume those rules are just there. Sometimes it’s funny in a good way: I don’t think I would be keeping up with Uproar except I “decided” it happens every Wednesday. Sometimes it’s funny in a sad way. Last October, when we talked about volunteering, my friend was right. I could just do that. He was also, I think, a little wrong: the fact that I didn’t wasn’t quite an indication that I didn’t want to. It was an indication that I believed in a world where I didn’t have time, that I’d moved recently and was feeling overwhelmed, that I didn’t know where to start. The rules I was seeing were between me and volunteering. It took some extra effort (and maybe my friend’s shove) to push through them.
                Baking follows the same template as most of the reality competition shows I’ve watched. It starts with a big group, and picks off people one by one to find a winner. “We can’t progress to next week with all of you, sadly…” Saying that, Giedroyc really did seem sad. I wonder how often I enshrine the rules I don’t like, the social habits I wish were otherwise, as though they’re some kind of unbreakable physical laws. As though I’m not one of those supporting them. We can’t. But can’t we? I find myself imagining a different kind of “reality” show, in which two skilled bakers taught something cool to an amateur. In week two the first amateur could share what they learned with a second, and the hosts could teach both something new. In week three there’d be three, or four. The group would expand instead of contract. You’d play off each other. You’d mess around, building on what went wrong. I’d like to watch that show unfold into next week, inviting more and more people to come along.

                “I started doodling ideas at odd hours, and I found that drawing a webcomic was an excellent way to avoid working on other seemingly more serious things. Better still, I discovered that research was an excellent way to put off working on the comic that I was drawing in order to procrastinate.”
                -Sydney Padua, preface for The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

                Sometimes I’ll see a student watching out a window or staring at the grains of wood in a table. They’re ‘lost in thought’—I like that phrase. As though thoughts have mountains and rivers and caves (they do), and in going out to get lost in them we can be more than we were before. Sometimes I won’t ask what they’re thinking. I don’t want to interrupt. Sometimes, when I do ask, they’ll say “nothing.” That can be because they don’t want to share, which makes perfect sense, but it can also be because they weren’t thinking about whatever the class was discussing, they weren’t “focusing on what they should,” and they’ve been taught to assume that makes their thoughts “nothing” at all. And of course it doesn’t. And of course, this isn’t only a story about a teacher watching students grow. Usually, in my mind, I’m a teacher and a student and a cook and a dishwasher, and sometimes I find a window.
                In The View from the Cheap Seats, Neil Gaiman suggests you “trust your obsessions.” When I talked to David Mochel, he asked me, ‘Right before bed, what do you think about without meaning to? What do you think about when you’re not thinking about anything at all?’ The answer, back then, was students and classes, stories and lessons and exercises that helped us understand things in new ways. That’s probably part of why being a teacher was a good fit. I’d like to keep practicing how to hold the reigns of my mind, how to direct myself toward one trail of thought or another, but I’d also like to unharness the horses and let them run. Maybe they’d head toward water, a spring I hadn’t found. Maybe they’d head toward a meadow, or up a ridge from which we could see a long, long way, or over the fields with the joy of moving. Maybe they’d roll in the dust.
                As far as I can tell we’re always thinking about something. When a student stops listening to our conversation their thoughts don’t disappear: they take a turn toward somewhere else. They find something else. I think it’s good to notice where we’re in the habit of going, but I think it’s also good to doodle because you’re procrastinating, to research because you’re putting off doodling. There’s something to trust in where we do not mean to go. I don’t know what I think about now, right before bed when I don’t mean to think about anything. It’s hard to tell in the confusion of these months. But the next time I go wandering, instead of asking myself to come back, I’m going to try to look around and what’s there.

                “We almost always can point to that hundredth blow, but we don’t always mark the ninety-nine other things that happen before we change.”
                -Maggie Stiefvater, All The Crooked Saints

                Years ago, I heard someone say “change happens very, very slowly, and then all at once.” A few weeks ago I heard someone say “a lot of quiet changes happen beneath the surface before it’s easy to see that something’s moved.”
                Stiefvater’s line comes after a little description of a barn. The wind nudges it ninety-nine times, and on the hundredth it falls, so it could seem like the hundredth was the one to blow it over. Since reading I’ve been trying to see back to all these hundreds. For instance: in working on my book, sometimes I’ll rewrite a scene without looking at the last draft, and it will be as though it was new. In some ways, it is. In lots of others, it isn’t. If I look at the two drafts, I can see what I was building between them, see what was gathering, see what I was brushing away. For instance: this week I might have made a new friend, but it wasn’t this week that we made each other friends. We said hello for the first time months and months ago. We talked a few times, in passing. We listened. We waved. This week the little paths of almost-being-friends that we’d both been building from where we were came close to each other, somewhere in the middle. 
                Growing up, I thought a lot about that hundredth blow. I thought about the dramatic actions that changed things, the clever tricks that reversed how a situation was unfolding. Walking around, now, I want to keep on seeing hundreds: I want to ask, what breath, and what breath, and what long dream of breathing is carrying me here?

                “But without a name, things get lost.”
                “Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.
                As a rule, be more.”
                -Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

                Lately I’ve been struggling with Uproar. I don’t know what to write. I look at old drafts, old streets, and they go around the water instead of into it. I love how Vuong acknowledges the importance of names: without them, “things get lost.” I love how Vuong highlights the danger of rules: with them, we’re headed toward “known places.” Instead we can get lost. Be lost. Stay lost.
                It’s refreshing. Like waking up, if you’ve been dozing; like falling asleep if you’ve been on your feet too long. I had a passing daydream that all houses had holes in the middle, that next to our kitchens or our living rooms we left gaps where we could reach down and sink our hands into the earth of the field. “It was always there.” I would like to live in a house like that. I suppose, in a way, I’ve seen some: in India my friend lived in a house shaped like a doughnut, it’s central space open to the rain and sky. 
                Staying in so much for these last months, my walls, my streets, having started feeling very stable. I’m so often near here: so often, and in such a way, that I’ve started making the mistake of thinking I know here. But I only know the rules, the streets, the paths I take from breakfast (muesli!) to work (writing!) to finding ways to connect with friends (parks!). But I’m not just trying to go where I’ve known. Race Street was not always Race Street: it won’t be Race Street forever. It also isn’t: isn’t the line I expect, the path I walk. It also is: earth, and the heat inside, birds, and the murmur of voices with the wind. I think there must be a way to keep using our words, our names, so we’re not always lost—and to get lost like waking up. Like falling asleep. Like going in. 
                Here we are. It isn’t harder. It isn’t easier. It’s more. It’s simple. It’s simply more than I had named.