but I can't stop listening

Kings of Convenience: "Homesick"

It's the season of endings. Strange, because Spring is rebirth, beginnings--but we are graduate students, living out the very end of our priveleged time at the University. We are as secretive and clannish as girls in Avonlea or Amherst a century ago.

As I go away from places, I discover how much I love them. The perfect circle of light from a hanging lamp, the slick cobblestones, the sound and smell of the canal. I know that I will miss these women, even miss the way I feel like an outsider sometimes. It is all tied to this small and private existence, these three years in close quarters. Tied to each other by The Tan Form and complaints about teaching assignments. It won't come again.


So I'll lose some sales, and my boss won't be happy/ But there's only one thing on my mind/ Searching boxes underneath the counter/ On the chance that on a tape I'd find/ A song for/ Someone who needs somewhere/ To long for

turn and face the strange

David Bowie: "Changes"

We're in your car, the windows are down, and I am more comfortable with you than I ever have been with anyone. Western Wisconsin streams by us in one graceful sweep of green and yellow fields. We will never cross the St. Croix River, we will never turn, respectively, 24 and 21. We will never leave this pocket of time, I think. Songs I've never heard before, including "Changes" and "Annie Waits" and "River Sea Ocean" fill the car, and we're singing out loud, and I will never hear these songs again without being back here with you. Without a little pain.

It is August. I haven't told anyone but you that what went on with Chris wasn't my choice. You haven't told anyone, but you're pretty sure you're still in love with me. Who cares. We're 60 miles from the Minnesota border, and everything I don't want to think about, I left there.

Sometime in the future, I know we'll be bitter to one another but right now there is nothing but tenderness.

At some point, I will be able to see my life without you, something I would never have believed.

When that point comes, I will be on a bus (my frequent and habitual location) in Minneapolis. You will be living a bit of a fantasy in Washington, D.C. I will be listening to my iPod, which is unusual; what is more so is that I don't switch the song when David Bowie's "Changes" comes on. Finally, I think, it's incredible, but I can let it go.

At a friend's MFA defense, she talked about the one loss you go back to over and over as a writer. You are that loss. Maybe in five years I'll fly that long flight east, or you will walk into the room where I am working (like I did, once). For now, "time may change me, but I can't waste time." There is too much that you aren't that I want to do.

"Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes: turn and face the strange, ch-ch-changes/ Don't tell them to grow up and out of it."