were they keeping us alive for our poetry? of course not. they were keeping us alive for our lungs.
…
1.
.
The first thing you ever read about coming out is a piece of flash fiction, whose title and author you will later forget. It is about a boy whose father catches him kissing another boy behind their house, in a swarm of mosquitoes, and the boy sits and listens to his parents yell about sexuality and love from the porch as he pets his dog, a golden retriever.
The story ends like that, and years later you will be most struck with the feeling of kissing someone in a swarm of mosquitoes, the bugs clinging all over your skin.
…
2.
.
You decide for a brief period of time to study biochemistry, but this is mostly because you want to do an internship with a surgical oncologist specializing in breast cancer surgeries. For about a year, you get to stand in the operating room as you watch breast after breast of all different kinds of women get sliced open, the surgeons' nimble fingers sticking with blood like jelly.
After a while they let you take the removed breasts to the pathologist's lab. In the sterile container, the breast tissue is still warm through the flimsy white plastic, and you feel it against your hands, this last vestige of life. If you were more concerned with literary criticism and theory, you could probably write volumes of how motherhood and feminism is contained here: a removed breast, cancer-ridden, is still warm against a younger woman's hands.
…
3.
.
One sunny day before your birthday, when your back hurts, you decide to go see the free exhibit of Eva Hesse's paintings at your art museum. She painted Spectres at Yale, which is probably why you end up going. For some reason or another, you bring a blank Moleskine notebook, and upon seeing the first piece, you want to cry, so you sit and write down a few things instead.
You're not supposed to be a poet, because it's silly and irrational and very, very indulgent. Poetry does not help people in the slightest, you tell yourself. Poetry is not a religion.
It isn't until later that you realize it's more important than that, so for now you stare at Hesse's disparate, ghastly anguish and write I will unravel the stars for you to no one in particular.
…
4.
.
You're interested in everything you can possibly study, and part of that has to do with undiagnosed bipolar disorder and extremely high mental capacity, but a much larger component has to do with your fascination with the fragility of all things. You work with a professor to diagram Maoist and Confucianist philosophies in China using orbital models from chemistry; you work on looking at the shift from HPV to cervical cancer at a molecular level; you spend a brief period of time involved with international political philosophy.
You decide that you are, after all, at most a human and, after a conversation with a favorite professor who casually says, We often forget that the Modern is all about healing that looks like anguish—you are secondly a philosopher, which means you're motivated by radicalism, by literature, by science and history.
You write so, so many bad poems.
…
5.
.
You think about Rachel sometimes. You see her a few times; you wear your prettiest dress and show her around campus and she's not captivated by the castles or by the blades of grass beneath them the way you are, how sometimes even the air is different in the spring.
You come to terms with the fact that you are a whole different kind of dislocated, a whole different kind of lonely. Your scars are purple, raised, messy. You wish they were clean, red; you want them to say, Look: The knife has passed right through.
…
6.
.
You become interested in aesthetic philosophy after talking to Santana and having one too many glasses of wine. You sign up for a seminar on aesthetics of women in film noir in the spring, and the first day, a pretty girl arrives to class late.
She doesn't really breeze, not really, but kind of barges her way in, wearing thick boots and a vintage army coat. Half her head is shaved, and she has brown hair and eyes more green than yours, tattoos all along one forearm. She smiles at you.
The next week, she sits next to you, and week after week, you talk to each other for longer and longer after each class. Eventually you grab coffee, then lunch. You exchange numbers, you ask her out to see a movie.
You know, from various conversations, that she is not good. But you don't want good. You kiss her the first time in a parking lot in the back of a run-down theater, and she kisses you back.
You don't let her take your clothes off when you fuck. You read a lot of Richard Siken: I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.
One night, after a party, you're standing on the back porch of the house she shares with some friends, and you tell her to burn your hip with a cigarette.
She does.
…
7.
.
You skip three days of classes before one of your closest friends collects you gently in his softest Yale sweatshirt and walks you to the student health center.
You start to see a therapist weekly. Sometimes you feel like your body is a center of car accidents. You get diagnosed, eventually, with bipolar disorder and with anorexia. You get put on mood stabilizers, you keep food journals and sleep journals and exercise journals. Things are difficult.
You write so, so many good poems.
…
8.
.
It's raining in February when you meet Spencer. You talk about everything—sad things, the bad parts of yourselves, flowers. You share mint tea in the rain; you hold hands tightly when you splash in puddles. You laugh a lot; you adore when she holds you. You frequently get extravagant brunches. For all intents and purposes, Spencer is beautiful and brave, but occasionally terrified of horror films, which amuse you, so you go to them frequently.
Soon you start saying things about Plato, and she scoffs and says things about mirror neurons instead, so you mutually agree on potatoes and sing her Leonard Cohen and Julia Stone and Bon Iver in her tiny dorm bed after she falls asleep. She is your favorite other person in the world, and it's not so hard to tell her so.
You kiss her first, but she's the first person to say I love you. Things dissolve sometimes, because you're young, and you're different people, and you're you, so sometimes you want nothing more than to hurt Spencer so much but hurting yourself.
But you adore waking up to her, and she kisses the scar from the cigarette burn on your hip while she cries once.
When she's asleep once you take a sharpie and scrawl We'll be home soon on the inside of her wrist.
…
10.
.
The summer before your last year at Yale you decide on a whim to visit Carlsbad Caverns. The drive from the nearest airport through the desert is surreal—you tell Spencer that the lungs of the earth have stopped breathing here, that you're on the moon, that the desert is merely an ocean that has gone extinct.
The caves themselves are the gorgeous intestines of the earth: dark, glittering, milky white. If you held the stalagmites in your hands, you wonder if they, too, would be warm. I want to breathe the dust of your hands, you find yourself whispering. Spencer rolls her eyes. It's always night in the middle of the earth, and you are in a heart when ventricles beat around you as bats make their way towards the moonrise at sunset. You take Spencer's hand as you walk out of the night, into the purple-blue desert air, the color of veins on the backs of a baby's eyelids. You watch the bats chase after bugs you can't possibly see as the moon rises against the sun.