in the present continuous

 My memory of my time on the hill last year starts with the flapping of a great bird above me. I run with my heart in my hands, my jeans pant against me. I'm being chased, I think. Another recollection I have is of stains. The big red stain on my shirt from the tomato basil pasta, the dull brown stain on my pants from kneeling in the dirt, the big blue stains in my moods. Then there was much yearning. Wishing it would rain. And realizing we sit, we sit across each other and we are so alike each other.  

Another recent addition has been airports and all the strangers who are momentarily touched by my presence, becoming studied by me because they cross their legs awfully slowly or perhaps, it is their lingering gaze out the window that intrigues me. But also there is the fact that you can’t paint a scene if you’re still in it. I tried writing about day in the night and only found rage. The next day, I was able to see past the crimson blotches and re-discovered a whole patch of color left unexplored. 

The year also consisted of thinking back, rewinding like a broken record because I had to find out the obscure experiences that made me. Often it was old friends that came to meet me. Sometimes they were faceless, all that remained of them was that they hug me back with twice the amount of love or affection or enthusiasm or life or fervor, even now when my fingers just barely reach around for their name. I also remember my many muses; the women I was constantly fascinated by and how they continue to fascinate me. One of these was of special significance to me for I encountered the first beginnings of my love for poetry through her and began memorizing it just because I would write it over and over in order to imitate her hand. I feel like I must have met the phrase “every class is art class if you don’t care enough” through her relentless creations during class-time that I would later trace in wonder. 

I also re-encountered the tongues of poetry that every day you can find people using. “13 lonely breakout rooms,” says a teacher as they send us off with a wistful smile, single-handedly summing up the root of everyone’s misery right there. “Talking people’s ears off,” my friend describes their mother as doing and surrendering with a shrug at the resounding gasps in the room at the comment. 

There had been no competition to my preoccupation with the sky until we started reading Plath and Beauvoir in class and just like that, senioritis was gone and my days of furious annotations were here again. Plath built towers of women — women she felt melted by, women who she wished would rest in their own vomit, women who were rivals, and women who she wished to climb into and spend her time “barking out one idiom after another”. Two blocks away, Beauvoir was dismantling the concept of women for me - she is enslaved to the species, she is forever doomed to her alienation - look in the mirror, you’ll find out, she told me. 

But the feeling that I was in the present continuous tense of some bigger event persists, remaining undistracted by all the other ephemeralities. Part of this is: month-flavored songs, qualia yet again, Okazaki fragments of my helix-shaped identity, laundry and contemplating dichotomy during laundry, and generous amounts of [inaudible].