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THIS IS ME, at Times Square in NYC, year 2006. I have an inkling that while this photograph doesn’t mean a thing to me right now—hardly a thing—it will in 2o years.

I feel so departed from this moment. I feel so disconnected from this person. Everything is so far away.

How It Happens in my Head

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THE DAY BEFORE I LEFT FOR CALIFORNIA, it was eighty-two degrees, sunshine and serenity. My mom and I went for coffee as we usually did, sat down and talked about travel arrangements and fiscal responsibilities, P’s and Q’s. She slipped me a twenty across the table as we broke off chunks of our cranberry orange scone. “Just a little spending cash.”

When we walked out, I thought it might be the last time. Perhaps when I returned, I wouldn’t want to come to this place anymore, or anywhere here. That was what Mom was afraid of, I could see, and she watched anxiously as I gathered my curls into a bunch. “Imagine what your hair will do in their weather,” she said. I recalled how humid it was in Florida, October 1999, the year my hair transitioned to curls; the year of the glasses; the year of the braces. So far from those days, I thought, I felt I’d grown up. I’d imagined California was always eight-two degrees plus sunshine, and that Californians were hard to appreciate a North Dakota afternoon like the one my Mom and I walked through.
That night when it cooled to the sixties, I’d found my friends. We clouded the bar for hours, crying over the roar of music and clamor, and conceptualized the next few months. Maybe I’d come back with a husband or a new hairdo, maybe I wouldn’t come back, we decided. As the house claimed the last call, we gathered ourselves in small ways and together, laughed out the door for the last time, drove around our favorite circuits, rolled down the windows and bullshitted, straight talk. The city pressed on past the window’s realms, I wanted to go home, I didn’t want to go home. It was the same conversations we’d always had, about the empty lots where buildings once stood, now robbed of aesthetic.
“So what’s going to happen now?” I asked, and I got the long answer, just the one I was looking for.
I could hear a train trundling through night. We crested into the country, just past the water towers, right near the grain elevators, where there was light but no sound. I was cold in my dress, my goosebump skin scraped by a chilly air, but I laughed anyhow, I smiled anyhow. Everyone took a moment to admire the sky before we packed up, took the corner on the wheel’s tips, parked in the alleyway, called it a night. Then I said I wouldn’t be back.
Then returning home to a dark house, tipping down the back stairs, I came to my luggage. It occurred to me: The next day just after dawn, I was going to be on the westward road. The summer I’d always wanted. A chance to break from familiarity and then, to rebuild. And I’d never been so uncertain.
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Missed Connection,

Thanks for visiting again! It was very nice to see you. I hope you enjoy your half-pound of hard salami, making all sorts of delicious, meaty creations! Eat it quick so you can visit sometime soon, preferably before my last day (May 16).

Love,
Deli Wench

PS. I like your beard.

BAM! it’s the BIG BAD BOOK.

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TODAY IS A BIG DAY. Kind of.

Approximately Yes, the book, is Blurb-ready—meaning, it’s up for grabs here. I made the book for a final project in my Lit editing class, compiling all of my favorite images, poetry and writings into 54 pages of homemade love.

This is something I’ve always wanted to create and it feels so nice to pull through with it. I really edited it down to what was most meaningful to me, tossing out a lot of the so-so ramblings and hubbub.

I certainly don’t encourage purchasing it, but the preview (click below) is so much fun!

I want to keep flipping through the pages. If I had the time, I would. Really.

Love,
Jenny

Fourth Grade’s Dreams

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IN FOURTH GRADE, I WAS ASSIGNED my first research paper. We could select the topic of our interest, go to the archaic library and pull together sentences that were as unplagiarized as was possible from a fourth grader, and type up several pages on the gargantuan PCs that bowed the desks they sat on. It was the assignment of the century.

My topic was—no questions asked—the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d never seen it, but loved the bright crimson arcs, it’s magnitude, the photos my grandparents had taken during their visit. I plugged away at the paper. I wanted to be a part of the paper.

At 10, as I recall, everything outside a 10-mile radius seemed miles away. Europe, Africa and Asia were on another planet. Sphinxes and Van Goghs and gondolas on Venetian canals were only images seen by 1960’s photographers, published in Little Flower School’s musty, crumbling library archives. The Golden Gate Bridge was somewhere, lain across a span of deep blue, cars sliding across it day by day. I’d never been on a plane. Back then, I never even imagined state lines.

Now that I’m 22, I grasp distance and the concept of velocity—that I can be somewhere, can go places with just time and patience (maybe a little money helps, too) and be far away. Now that I’ve been to every corner of the United States, and seen how the states are united from forest to forest, Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, Roswell to Orlando—I understand. There is an Interstate, a highway system, back roads patterned across every terrain that want to be driven on.
Come June, I will see Golden Gate when I finally visit—and for the summer, live in San Francisco. I’ve never been to California, but I’ve never met a state I didn’t like. And this 10-20 mile radius I’ve been circling for the past months will, for the while, lay by the wayside as Fourth Grade’s dreams transpire.

Fake Nails

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THERE WAS A TOILET, AND A BATHROOM STALL, and a fake nail on the floor. I looked at it, it looked at me with it’s faux french tip, nude plastic and glue shriveled around the contours. It was a lifeless, detached from the digits it clasped to, whose fingers it ran through the hair of, perhaps nose-picked, stroked, licked and scratched. On the bathroom floor, it was lost.

Never, I thought to myself, would anyone catch me wearing those. And, I haven’t, not since prom two-thousand-something when my date picked me up in his dad’s SUV, I wore a $25 eBay lace wedding dress, and that was that. I’d never thought about fake nails since, like holiday decorations on clearance after the fact, like your high school mile time—you forget.

I looked down at my paint-stained, stinky cream shoes, yesterday’s socks I’d slipped on my feet in haste after a morning run, my long jeans rolled to accommodate my legs, the broken zipper on my pants. Shit. Fake nails are yet years, years away.