On a Case of Pathless Anxiety

42:00:00:00
In just forty-two days, you will be a college graduate. Only 10,008 hours, 60,480 minutos, 3,628,800 seconds, and you will walk across the stage in front of your family and friends. You will flick the blue and red tassel from right to left, a metaphorical windshield wiper clearing away the detritus of the majority of your life. For the first time in twenty-two years, you will not be a student. You will have a degree in Creative Writing with a minor in Linguistics y un otra en Espanol. But what is that worth when the price is your identity?

37:18:22:42
You could have applied for grad school, clung to the title Student a little longer, put off the inevitable for four, maybe five, more years. But in the end you’re right back here, unsure – afraid – of what is waiting on the other side of the stage.
You couldn’t afford it anyway. Your student loans are already enough to buy a good-sized mansion. It is a conundrum; go out and work, pay down the debt, or take on more. you can’t afford more debt, Mastercard just turned me down, the Experian report would only be considered reasonable if it were out of 100. But when you have the credit score, when the banks won’t laugh me right back out the door, will they let you back in? A Catch 22, poor Yossarrian.

25:22:42:16
Mom offered to let me come home. Just until you get it all sorted out. You almost believed that Bon Jovi song. But no, you can’t go home. Dad’s already called the contractor about his new home theater.
Twenty-five days. Your toes grip the edge of the precipice of graduation, fighting the forces behind me. Look down. It’s a long-ass way to fall.

20:15:44:20
You had a teacher your junior year. She taught you how to curse in Espanol. Mierda. It’s not like when you learned them in English. When Dylan’s dad said a palabra sucia at his sixth birthday party. It was a sleepover and someone – John Thomas – had decided having a soda fight would be a great idea. No, now you are an adult, you can learn dirty words in class. You are an adult, right? Nine days until you find out.

14:21:17:19
What about your dreams? Will the world destroy them? Stomp on them like the playground bully? Will you be left a broken shell, more child than man? Empty pockets, a brain full of useless knowledge? You should never start a story with dialogue, unless you like staring a story with dialogue. An allomorph is one of two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morpheme in its different phonological or morphological environments. Me llamo Andrew. Donde es el bano? Show, don’t tell, except when it is acceptable to tell. In English, verb+ed results in past tense. Ditto with plurals. Except there are always exceptions should you choose to accept them. Buenos dias señorita. Tengo un gato en mis pantalones. Quoth the raven, nevermore.

9:42:01:00
You want to be a writer when you grow up. When you grow up. When will that be? Did you miss it already? Like elementary school. You know it happened, tu madre has lost fotos to prove it. Pero, no se, you don’t remember. Was there a moment, a single frame in the motion picture of your life, when suddenly you were a grown up? You have changed a lot in these cuatro anos, si, enfolded in the hallowed, ivy-clad walls. But did you really grow up? Are you now – gasp – an adult? Does the world judge you capable of taking care of yourself? In the eyes of the law you have been an adult for many years, but what about your eyes? Too late. Nothing gold can stay. Time to sink or swim. The real world is coming. Ay dios mio!

7:01:42:06
Every college should require classes on being an adult. But there were no lectures on investing wisely. No prof pulled you aside and told you how much things will really cost. And that the world will take American Express, but it prefers payment in time and souls. There was no average annual income pie chart illustrating how much of your hard earned denero will be sucked away by los bastardos a las utility company. Countless classes you could take but there was never one on how to survive after you leave the comfy shelter of campus. You played blissfully in an isolated Eden, spared the daily terror of the ‘real world.’ It awaits you, biding its time. But in just seven days…
Life 101, graduate requirement por todos estudiantes. “Welcome to the world me muchacho pequeño. She’s a bitch. But we will do our best to help you navigate the turbulent agua o adulthood. We will walk you through the problems of insurance and Big Brother. Give you insider secrets about the corporate pit bulls waiting to suck out your souls and deposit them in the cubical Hades of 9-5. If you’re lucky. Abandon all hop ye who pass thorough these emblemed doors! You will leave these peaceful halls with a confident/competent stride as you skip down the fools’ gold road of life.” No Universidad de conocimiento should shove its students across the graduation stage without it.

1:03:37:42
The night before graduation you realize that your life’s dream es un sham. The pointless pipe dream of an unambitious slacker. Un novelist, por dios. There hasn’t been any thing original since the Greeks. Not even them. Shakespeare got close, but the ever elusive original plot slipped through his ink-stained fingers time and again. Every story has been told and retold through so many colored lenses that only the dimmest light finds its’ way through anymore. You can attempt to create something original, but you will only come up with a life story. Or a love story, which is, in fact, just a twist on the life story. Es no possible, señor. Lo siento. The entire literary/story telling history of the world is just an elaborate rehashing of the same story, over and over again, until we believe we have stumbled on something shiny and nuevo. How simple our little minds must be. My Bog have mercy on our ignorant soles.

00:00: 25:07
Un dia de reckoning es aqui. The cheap, red polyester sticks to your damp neck. So the red and blue tassel will migrate across your forehead, cutting the carotid artery of your simple life in its relocation . Your worth will no longer be evaluated on a scale of 0-100; gpa doesn’t exist in the real world. No more sylibi, no more cram sessions, no more student discounts. No more excuses. There is no longer winter and summer break. Life is 24/7, 365.
The fat person smell, that semi-sweet mixture of cake and b.o., wafts over from the muchacha next to you. She is smiling. Mi Dios, such beautiful idiocy. Maybe she has a plan, a job lined up in Daddy’s company; maybe she doesn’t belief the real world is waiting, just licking its lips on the other side of the stage, to swallow her up like the ravenous Cerberus it is. Its teeth tearing her childish dreams to bloody ribbons as it gluts itself on the smorgasbord of new grads. All of this – the time, the money, the effort – for a putrid piece of animal skin. A useless condom to frame so you can point to it one day and say, “Si, I did it.” A brief, shining moment of self admiration. Drink it in, savor it, it will be the last time. The apocalypse inches closer. Closer. Done with the K’, on to the L’s. You turn, searching for desperate comfort in the puertas of the auditorium. They recede, stretching into the distance. You can’t flee back into the safe arms of undergraduatehood. M’s. Uno mas!

0:00:00:00
“Andrew Michael MacLeod.”
The horror, the horror.

Stage Fright

Standing before them, I feel naked.
Unseen eyes bore into my flesh like weevils.
The flames of embarrassment leap around me
As I stand,
Lashed to an imaginary stake,
At center stage.
I can feel the heat rising through my body.
Burning my chest,
My throat,
My cheeks.
In the black abyss of the audience, someone giggles.
My stomach flies into my mouth,
Desperate to escape the heat of the foot lights.
I open the gate of my clenched teeth to let it escape.
My line tumbles out,
Sticky with the saliva of fear.
Then relief,
A deep breath.

The show must go on.

Self Reflections

The best laid plans of mice and men,
Oft’ go astray.
Many days, I wake to find
Life getting in the way
Of my goals, my dreams, my grand design,
Of simple plans for today.
Or could it be,
That it is me
Who is standing in my way?

Horizons

Jessica sat on the worn, wooden steps of her father’s farmhouse watching the weak November sun as it struggled to burn off the morning fog. She pulled the patchwork quilt tighter around her shoulders. It still smelled of him; sweat and cigarette smoke, sun and dust. It was hard to believe Daddy was gone.

She squeezed her eyes shut to hold back the tears. She waited, without daring to breathe, to hear him in the kitchen, his heavy work boots thudding down the hall, curses as he spilled coffee trying to open the screen door. But there was nothing. Just the cooing of doves somewhere in the mist.

The sun began to win its battle with the fog as she gazed blindly over the yard. She could make out Daddy’s old pickup. Soon the barn and John Deere parked out front solidified a little further away. Slowly the fog retreated to reveal the bleak West Texas landscape. Jessica shivered as the miles of ironed-flat land stretched out before her. She had never been comfortable with so much horizon. Driving through a place like this made you feel like you were crawling. Living in it was even slower. There was nothing to break it, nothing to race toward.

The day she left for college in Austin, where there were too many trees and skyscrapers to see the horizon, she had asked Daddy why he had stayed, after Mama left and Grandpa died, how he kept sane with so much space. He had squinted out over the cotton fields, the way he always did when he wasn’t sure how to answer. But then he had looked up into the cloudless blue sky and smiled just a little. “Living out here, it makes you realize how small you really are. That this world ain’t really about you, you just live in it for a time. It keeps you honest with yourself.”

She hadn’t understood what he meant. She was standing in front of her Civic, her entire life jammed into the trunk. They had both been crying. Had both said a lot of things that only made sense at that moment of separation. But as she sat on the cold porch steps years later, huddled in a moth-eaten quilt, thinking about his coffin as it was lowered into the ground, she knew that he was right.