Friday's Whims of the Time Traveler 4.1: April 7th, 2011

Letters Before Graduation

by Belinda Roddie

May twenty-first seems like a sub-standard, succulent trifle of a day, like mint melting on the lips of a sweet-toothed lover. To some obsessive Christ druggies, keen on the idea of heaven after an earthquake and a potential zombie apocalypse – keen enough to sell their homes and drag their children by the ears out of the gleam of sunshine from a classroom window – May twenty-first is the dawn of the Rapture, grace among dead bodies. And if that’s the case, then I should wear a machete under my gown as I receive my bachelor’s in compulsive imagination because there’s a new dawn for me, a day when I hope I can be redeemed by the browned hand of a carpenter who felt nails in every place but the thumb.

And after my mentors, not so old and wizened, shake my hand and tell me that I’m in for an adventure, I will absorb each word like the ultra-violet rays soaking my cheeks and nose and chin in red and green from the leaves masking the unfiltered terror brimming behind the whites of my eyes. Because I know it will be an adventure. I know it will be the most exciting and challenging and powerful and complicated and horrific and utterly mystifying adventure of my life.

I know this.

But there’s a cost. Not a monetary one. Not losing a handful of change at the BART station on my way to work. Not the price of gas in a decade of electricity and wind and sunspots and hybrids of all breeds driving on a dead-end road back to LA from the Bay Area to visit a prestigious haven where we were still taught how to laugh. No. Not that. The cost of an adventure is always another adventure, one with whirlwinds and shipwrecks and treasure maps with X’s on every corner. And of course a companion, a sidekick, a partner, always there for every mountain I heave myself over like a rock trying to breathe. And I had hoped that my companion would have been you.

Yes, there’s a you involved. Because you are the subject of a two-month-long diary entry so far, scratched out in the same illegible handwriting; and you appeared to me, like an angel, at the worst time of my life because I didn’t need this ache but at the best time because I needed to be saved. You, with a laugh like a virus that my body doesn’t want to fight – you, with eyes that glimmer even when half-open under lined lids – you, with the penchant for singing and dancing and balancing my stolen heart in your hand. You, you, and for now, only you.

May twenty-first hangs like a cobweb floater along my weeping cornea. May twenty-first, when I say goodbye to libraries, to lectures, to essays, to whittled fountains of wisdom – to busts of Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan and Ella Fitzgerald – to sinus headaches, itchy cheeks, QSA, Catholicism, and home cooked food from a friendly Mexican – to friends, new bonds, smiles, and you, leaving me Facebook and a stack of photo albums and a misshapen résumé carrying me like a magic carpet to a strange but familiar place. How do I cope? How do I let go?

Because in this remaining month and a half, I have written a list, not long but still dense like the Santa Ana winds swelling my jawbone with air. I want to see you every day before I drive eight hours through pregnant traffic back to trodden grounds. I want to print stories and poems and goofy anecdotes to read to you when I am not called to a café where, for some reason, I expect you to be sitting with a hot drink of some variety. I want to watch you on video, your face and hair radiating artificial sunlight that reflects off a camera lens not worthy to look at you with its glass eye. I want to cheer with you at a pride rally and then buy you late-night breakfast after the crowds die down. I want to bring you pizza when you’re high and play you music when you’re drunk. I want to sing along to Youtube clips when you’re sad and give you my coat when you’re cold and I won’t mind the chill and the goosebumps because I know you’re warm. I want to pull your hands out from under the faucet and kiss the raw pink skin where the hot water has peeled away the layers and whisper in your ear that everything will be okay – not because I’m here, or you’re here, but because we’re both here, together.

I’ve got more than fifty days to read this list over and over again and dream about it coming true before I finally accept that it won’t.

Because you’ve got someone with a smile under stubble, and I’ve got a one-way pass out of the nether regions that I’ve called my home for four years. And I know that even if one day I could come back, maybe for an editing job in West Hollywood or a teaching credential in Fullerton, you’d be far away from me.

This is not the end of the world. This is not the only beginning, or false start, to get my blood bubbling, carbonated like cheap beer that I refuse to drink. This is a road that my poor feet have blistered on before, and they blister again soon enough. So why, when it hurts so badly, do I not take one good look at you and wrap my wounds in gauze instead of kissing them with salt? You were not made for me, and to meet you sooner wouldn’t have made a difference in this tiny, claustrophobic world we inhabit.

Let’s be friends, at least, the best for you and the second-best for me, while my heart bursts waiting for the adventure, waiting for May twenty-first, waiting for dusk.

The work you see here has not been edited nor modified since April 7th, 2011.