twilight

towards the end of elementary school, i would sneak out of the Campbell Center during after school daycare and wander around the Big Building. i was in eighth grade then and getting ready to leave the school where i had grown up for ten years. by that time, the teachers had all already gone, including the principal. the secretary might still be in the office on the second floor, but i never went up there. i would move down the hall, looking at what Mrs. Hassett had posted outside of her classroom, peeking into the clinic where cotton balls were kept in clear jars steeped in some green cleanser. but mostly i would look at the trophies. the church had been built long before Santa Ana even became a city, when there was no Main Street or downtown. the school had been built in 1956. we always complained that there was no grass to play on, everything was asphalt. whenever someone banged a chin or scraped a knee, we would always mutter about us not having any grass like the other schools. only that unforgiving asphalt.

there were two cases: one tall made of wood with glass doors that could slide open if unlocked, the other was made completely of glass with only two wide shelves. the trophies weren't in chronological order. i don't remember what they said now. there were some for tennis, some for baseball. i think there might have been some for track. in the shorter case there was a photograph in black in white. the caption at the bottom said "downtown" and "parade" and "along Main Street" and i could see the buildings lining the street and how they were the buildings i could see now but then much sharper--clean and new. like those photographs of new york city in the 40s and 50s. along times square and broadway, the streets are pristine with no litter, no trash. in the center of the photograph was a float with a number of women standing or sitting, wearing classy things for those times and beaming. they were being honored, but i can't remember what for. i did this almost every afternoon, long before i had ever seen The Dead Poet's Society and heard Robin Williams' voice as he spoke as if he were one of the long gone boys in the photographs his students were looking at. it wasn't true, i thought, when i saw that movie. when you look at things like that, you don't hear just one voice. you don't even hear words. you hear the crowds cheering, the motors moving along the street, the grunts and cries of the athletes on the field, the smack of baseball on bat, the hollower collision of tennisball and racket. i wanted so badly to know something old.

then i went to high school where they were always working on new buildings. to be a good school meant having better facilities. it meant changing the landscape so that when past students came back after a year or two they wouldn't recognize the place where they had spent four years of their life. the high school i went to doesn't exist anymore. that version is gone. there are new spaces now and new buildings, steps where there didn't used to be any and grey tiles instead of white. there is a pool. what an extravagance.

and now? i am going to graduate from university next saturday. i complained in the beginning, there is plenty of proof in the archives. i made it clear that i was frustrated and unhappy. and when i think about it, i only began to like my university because of the people. my professors and my peers. i wasted time, or perhaps i should say i took up time working and doing music when i could have been doing what i wanted to do from the beginning: write. it wasn't until i gave up choir that i began really to get involved with the creative writing program. i wish i could have gotten involved earlier. i feel like i'm leaving without having learned everything. other writers seem so sure of themselves, they know how to improve their writing without having to be told. i don't know how to do that yet. how will i keep things going without a workshop to guide me and force me to write? i also feel that my writing is in a strange place right now. i haven't yet written my first fifteen stories--the first fifteen that they say a writer must write to get all the amateur out of their system. after these fifteen, a writer can get down to business. i've written nine and after i heard other people read the other day, that seems very apparent. my longer short stories tend to have dramatic premises when the finer stories extraordinize the banal. as an inexperienced writer, i go for the big story, even if i do tell it quietly. i need to learn to see the value in simple stories too. real life isn't dramatic, it's every day.

but my short short stories, the ones that are only three or four pages long, those have something breathless in them. more people have liked those. the thing about writers is that they don't have faces. they don't appear on tv screens or photographs in magazines. or very rarely to only the few who look for them. if the author is known only by its first two initials, then they are genderless as well. then there are pseudonyms and pen-names. bright minds with shiny penny thoughts and no faces. this means that the writer is always at a distance from the reader. a moviegoer would feel that they know more about a moviestar than an author. what i'm trying to say is that there can't be any excuses, no explanations. when a reader thinks your story doesn't work for these reasons or that it doesn't compare to your others, you can't sit and explain during an interview what you were trying to do. books just don't get the same kind of media that would allow an author to cast a net over her audience. or maybe that is an inner circle that i am not permitted to enter. feeble-minded and simple as i am. still becoming as i am.

and i'm not nearly as confident. after five ten-week workshops i'm still shaky when hearing everyone's feedback. and yet i'd always want to hear. i said that once to everyone in my class, i said, "I'd always want to hear what readers think." with the things i want to do, i'd want to hear to see if i'm doing it right. always. i used to think i wrote for myself, but writing for myself means getting people to understand me and only the reader's understanding is any indication of whether i've done it. if that makes sense. even if it still twinges to hear it, i'd want to hear it, whether its criticism, skepticism, suggestions. i'd like to think of myself as a humble person, but there is a difference between humility and lack of self-confidence and i think i walk that line too often, especially when it comes to my writing. and i'm really going to hate losing the community of readers and writers here at my university. i respect and admire all of them and though they probably don't recognize me as much as i recognize them, i'll still miss their faces. i'll miss knowing that they are there, writing and struggling as much as i. it's true that their lives will go on once i stop seeing them, but that would be another world. as far as what's in front of my eyes, they will no longer exist. does that sound selfish? i don't mean it to be. i mean to say that i will miss seeing them. they will go to where i cannot see them. and i will too.

and, for me, that happens to be New York City. New York City. i will be there for ten weeks this summer doing an internship with a publishing house downtown. i'm still finding it hard to believe even now, almost two months after i found out. if you're wondering, it feels like your life is unraveling and if you're me, you'd grab after those lose ends and try to catch them but they are just out of reach. i feel like my life is unraveling. school is done, finals are next week and i no longer have the routine homework to do. no schedule, nothing due, no class. its as if someone has slipped the partitions out of the box and all the different colored marbles are rolling around together for the first time. i'm a little panicked. nothing i know is in New York City. and though i won't admit how frightened i am when people bring this up, it is far. there won't be comments that need posting on the eee noteboard every tuesday and sunday night, no paper drafts due every other friday, no critiques to write for tuesday/thursday workshops. there won't even be the traffic lights along culver and the traffic along jamboree and the cranes swooping across Mason Park. in the past, the whole prospect of summer was so relieving that i was glad to see it--but only because i knew what would happen afterwards. it was a freedom with certainty. it was a freedom with seasons. this...this is something else. i think i might be scaring myself.

well, after the internship, there will be a trip to Europe. Germany, Switzerland and Austria. we're going to Vienna at last and i plan to run around the streets in circles and throw my arms out wide and dance around like a lunatic across the cobblestones and squares. Vienna! i'm more excited for that than i was for Paris. i hope there will be an opera or a symphony or something conducted by a man with frizzy hair and erratic baton habits. Vienna! where i hear they exchange information on famous sopranos and tenors the way people here exhange the statistics on basketball players. where men free the horses and pull the carriages themselves when the one inside the carriage has just sung incomparably a Mozart. to think that they live their lives there within the grip and under the sway of such music. they wouldn't think so, most like, but to me they seem like giants, people who have been exposed so long to a certain type of wind that they've grown to surpass an average man or woman. like the stuff of myths and legends. and they are bakers and butchers and shopkeepers. its the music they inhale everyday. Vienna.

and me not knowing a word of German. how embarrassing.

of course, when i think of it, i think of these things. romantic. i wouldn't be surprised if ends up being quite the modern city.

well, i think i've exhausted any range of emotions by now, so i will stop. i only wanted this one to be long because i don't know when next i will write. plus its an important time, i want to look back on this and remember.

this is what i will be doing for the next couple of weeks if you never see me again:

tuesday, 10 june 2008: submitting final paper for French 139W Vagabonds; sister's birthday
thursday, 12 june 2008: phi beta kappa initiation ceremony; my birthday
friday, 13 june 2008: graduation honors convocation
saturday, 14 june 2008: school of humanities graduation
saturday, 28 june 2008: last day at bookstore
sunday, 29 june 2008: ALA convention, booksellers dinner
friday, 4 july 2008: leave for NYC
monday, 7 july 2008: first day at Abrams
friday, 12 september 2008: last day at Abrams
sunday, 14 september 2008: leave for Zurich

i really wish i didn't have to work at all after graduation, but my coworker had surgery on her wrist and i can't just leave my boss in the lurch. after all, she did get me the internship in new york. so there will be a significant lull when everyone i know has gone off their various cliffs into the sparkling ocean below and i'm still along the path trudging along. but it'll be alright, i think. my time will come later.

its coming this very moment. can you see? i'm bending my knees and holding out my hands to meet it.