14 August 2018
1. Promise yourself that you’re going to have a mellow summer. Promptly sign up for three classes, two jobs, and one internship. Grumble at yourself about it for the next twelve weeks, but secretly enjoy being busy.
2. Drive over to Marin for a hike with a friend. Stop at the top of the trail for lunch and wander through the dried grasses and oak trees until you find a perfect spot protected from the cold ocean wind. Realize it’s not very protected at all when the wind kicks up for real and blasts pollen straight into your hay-fever prone face; spend the next three hours sneezing violently and feeling your eyes swell nearly shut from rubbing them so much. On the drive home, eyes successfully deflated, sit in the passenger seat and eat crumbling pancakes smeared with peanut butter that you carried along with you in a ziploc bag.
3. Head to work in hilly Oakland and come around a bend in the road and see the city and all its lights spread out below you. It’s beautiful. It kind of reminds you of Auckland. Catch your breath and let your eyes fill with tears, just for a moment.
4. Wander up into the hills behind your house for hours and hours. Carry a book with you. Collect sage and mugwort as you go, tucking them into pockets here and there and find them later, fragrant and disarticulated, in your clean laundry. Stop every ten feet to check the view. Get lost in imagining that the world has stopped while you’ve been away, and that you’ll have to keep walking and walking until you can’t hear the sirens anymore and must learn to survive on berries and acorns and scavenged food from remote mountain outposts. Descend back into the city by degrees of noise. (It hasn’t stopped while you’ve been away).
5. Re-read every book on your bookshelf (nearly). Cry while reading S.E. Hinton and Cormac McCarthy and Leif Enger and Elizabeth Gilbert and Philip Marsden and Neil Gaiman. Think about how you used to fill up notebooks with lists of books you’d read when you were younger because keeping track of your favorites felt like making a map of yourself.
6. Feel lonely sometimes, and when you do, sleep with three of your favorite stuffed animals and your heaviest quilt even though it’s summer. Feel a little bit better.
7. Walk to campus on warm days, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. Spread out the blanket you found in the back of your first car on the grass and lay there for hours watching the clouds and listening to the bells in the clock tower keep time.
8. Spend many hours worrying that you don’t have any legitimate hobbies. Consider taking up ceramics (too expensive). Think about knitting again (too much of a winter activity). Wonder if maybe you should write something (yeah right). Realize that maybe if you spent less time worrying that you don’t have any hobbies you might actually have time for some hobbies.
9. Walk up to the track above the dorms to go for a run; get distracted on your first lap because it’s twilight and there’s bats out. Get even more distracted on your second lap because an owl just flew past on silent wings. Follow it with your eyes all the way across the field and then run to the tree it’s landed in; forgo the rest of your workout entirely and stand there staring up at the silhouette of an owl for thirty minutes before it finally flies away.
10. Call your parents. A lot. Call them, like, at least every other day.
11. Hang out at the bar where one of your best friends works and reminisce for far too long about the people you both know from back home. Drive everyone else around you crazy, probably. Revel in the feeling of not having to explain how chaotic the afterparty of your senior prom was, or how crooked your teeth used to be before you got braces, or who you had a crush on in fourth grade.
12. Decide you hate the sound of the train in the wee hours of the morning more than you’ve hated anything else in your entire life. The next day, feel overcome with bittersweet affection for the train, its ubiquitous and comforting sound; decide that, really, you’re going to miss it when you leave.
13. Climb out your bedroom window to sit on the balcony. Do your homework there sometimes. Eat dinner there sometimes. Stare up at the sky there all the time. Watch how the late-setting sun lights up the buildings with that hazy California orange and makes the shabby stucco walls beautiful.
14. Start wearing sunscreen every day, because you’re twenty-two and you’re starting to get tiny lines around your eyes and it’s probably time to admit that your mom was right about pretty much everything, including sun protection.
15. Pick up a flossing habit while you’re at it.
16. Take a drive up the coast to Fort Ross with classmates that became friends. Stare out at the Northern California landscape rolling by outside the window of the car, all thick silent fog filling coastal inlets, jagged ocean cliffs, wide dry golden rolling hills dotted with stands of pine. Eat a bowl of borscht for lunch; fill up a roll of film for the first time in months. Sing as much of “American Pie” as you can remember on the drive home and laugh until your stomach hurts.
17. Wake up from a dream about a place you haven’t seen in two years. Lay in bed for a few moments with your eyes closed, replaying the sleepy memory of the muezzin’s call drifting through the streets and in through the window, the feel of your fingertips on the wall as you balance yourself on the narrow stairs on your way down to light the stove for breakfast, the warmth of the cobblestones soaking through your sandals as you wander through the marketplace, and the chill on your skin that day you got caught in the rain after taking too long to eat the greasy french fries you’d been craving. Grin to yourself about it the rest of the day.
18. Read a letter from a dear friend and sit down on your bed and read it again and think about how lucky you are to know the people you know, and how tenuous and circumstantial the threads are which tie us to each other but also how strong. Think about all the time you spent imagining that you were somewhere else and realize you can’t pinpoint exactly when you stopped doing that.
19. Put your headphones in late at night, put on your slipperiest socks, and dance on your hardwood floor with the windows open because it’s summer and it’s warm and you’re in your underwear and that’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to do on a warm summer night.
20. Hike up the fire trails on the 4th of July to watch the fireworks with new friends; realize you can hardly see the fireworks anyways because you’re higher up than the tallest building in the whole city. Smoke a little bit of the weed from your garden back home that you keep in a pint-sized mason jar which used to contain your mother’s pickled relish; curl up against the curling root of a eucalyptus tree in warm silence under the foggy sky with the pop of fireworks in the distance. Look up at the stars and think about another night you spent looking up at the stars, except that time it was your twenty-first birthday and you were wrapped up on the dry grass in thick woolen blankets pulled from the back of your friend’s truck, and you were eating banana bread out of the pan with your fingers while you looked for the Southern Cross. That time, the sky was so dark and the stars so thick it was hard to make your eyes focus on any single one. Look up from your tree root at the lights of the city reflecting off the fog. Close your eyes. Smile.
SGBRSH 