End of semesters are always sad for me.

One day we'll talk about 2000, 2005, and 2012, and people will listen the same way we listen to older people talk about the '50s and '60s. It will all seem unfamiliar and uninteresting to them, even though these years currently hold our lives and everything we love. We'll remember a few important memories from them - some songs and images will always remind us - but our neurons can't hold it all. Most everything will be gone. People will live in our dorms and think about the students who lived there 50 years ago: us.

I want to always be twenty. I want to always go to college and stress out over final exams and what I'm going to do with my life, as if there will ever be any certainty. I want to be able to play roller derby without worrying about my body falling apart. I want to get drunk and do stupid things and live off of Ramen Noodles and dry cereal. I want to always have enough courage to yell at old conservative men and sexist people at parties, and I want to always care enough to do it. I want to be able to stay at my parents' house knowing they expect me to make a mess of my bedroom, and I want to always have a room here. I want to cuss every other word because why the fuck not?

I can never erase the Southern part of me, and I don't want to.

I don't want to hide my Southern accent from pretentious academics, and I don't want to feel ashamed when I get excited about country music, about banjos, about George Strait.

I never want to leave the south and say "it's not worth talking about those people there," as if the place didn't introduce me to some of the best goddamn people I've ever met, as if some people matter less than others.

I never want to deny that part of the reason I love slam poetry so much is because it reminds me of the anger and conviction I always heard in my Southern Baptist preacher's voice when he talked about God being an angry, wrathful, and male God. I also can't deny that I originally learned what it means to be passionate in Sunday school classrooms with cold metal chairs and wooden walls - at alters and with youth groups.

I'm convinced that so much of my writing style, so much of the way I tell stories, so much of the way I talk comes from the stories I heard riding the church bus every single Sunday starting at age three. I can hear myself stopping in the same places the men who told the stories would stop. I break my sentences in the way they spoke. The stories they told were always funny stories, ones you could tell were made up at least a little, with a moral at the end - something the men learned about God that made the narratives they constructed meaningful. And the stories were always way too insightful, way too sentimental.

Every single Sunday I heard stories told almost universally by Southern men, and despite their sentimentality, they helped shape me; they're a part of the way I speak. They taught me how to make an every day experience useful, how to infuse it with so much meaning it becomes sickening. 

Last week I felt like I had completely lost my ability to appreciate anything. I walked around downtown, did homework, swung in the middle of the night, talked to a psychologist, and spent way too much money on food. During everything, I felt hopelessly sad.

This week I successfully interacted with new people socially (okay, one person, but everything counts), had a really good roller derby practice, walked back to my room at 2 AM in the wind and freezing rain without an umbrella, and realized that I'm not going to do so great grade-wise this week. I also still spent way too much money on food.
And yet, I feel okay. I feel good sometimes, even.

When I talked to the psychologist (it was for ADD, but she also asked questions about depression), I probably seemed like some hopelessly depressed and socially anxious person. At that time, and most of the time prior to that, I was. And I can never tell when I will be again, despite feeling more okay right now.

I don't understand my life.

Lovely things about this winter

I feel like getting through every winter is a struggle. I hate knowing that I can't walk outside without feeling like I'm going to crumble and break in half from how cold and windy it is. I hate how I feel I'm never warm, no matter how many huge jackets I wear. I hate that I feel the need to run all the places I need to get to just because it means I'll be inside quicker. I hate how going anywhere seems like such a daunting and miserable task.

I like being able to walk outside barefooted, and I love the feeling of walking from an overly air-conditioned building and into the heat. (Somehow it's different than walking into a heated building in winter; I need the sun.) I love how hot asphalt is in the summer. I love picking berries in my yard and spending time on my front porch. I love the laziness of summer, how it slows everyone down, and how it gets chilly again at night so you can still wear sweaters. I love how the city is always hotter, and how you have to wear as little clothing as possible to not feel miserable. I LOVE warmth. I need it to be happy, and to even just feel okay. And not artificial warmth, either. I need the sun.

I'm trying to be more positive, though.  Even though the good moments were surrounded by coldness and probably by my silly brain shit, there were definitely some not-miserable moments. I got an email from my favorite professor, for example, that will always mean the most to me. I joined a roller derby team. I got to see one of my favorite musicians play a beautiful christmas show with my mom, which involved singing christmas carols with some lovely strangers and seeing him perform "Sister Winter," a song that pretty much sums up my wintry experiences every year. I got to spend christmas with my family.

My mom also got her very last hepatitis C shot, which is really good for her. She's starting to gain back the weight she lost, enjoy food again, and just feel better in general. Hopefully the hepatitis will stay out of her blood for good, but it was an experimental drug, so there's not much certainty at this point. But for now, things are okay, and I'm glad and hopeful.

It also snowed on my campus, and I walked through it alone in the middle of the night with the stupidest smile. I made a snow cat and hit people with snow balls. My loneliness didn't matter anymore because everything - the bike racks, the buildings, the sidewalks - was covered with snow, and everyone was outside playing in it. I would have died for that when I was little and spent hours outside playing in the snow by myself.

In January and February I spent the night at my best friend's dorm and saw the Vagina Monologues, and I remembered how much I love the people who go to Salem. I went to the Idiot Box,  had vegetarian "steak," and visited a bunch of cute shops downtown with another lovely person. I was reunited with my other best friend after an unbelievable year and a half of not seeing each other. I got to fly, which is something I always want to do. I got to spend time in different airports, go to places beyond North Carolina, and spend way too much money on airport food and drinks. I got to have homemade spaghetti and drink wine with a bunch of kind people I immediately liked. I got to have a relaxing weekend where I escaped from all the usual things that stress me out.

I know it's new right now, and my opinion might change, but I also started to work in a lab I really, really like. I like the people I work with, my bosses, and the grad students I get to help. I'm honestly not that passionate about the research we're doing, but the overall "theme" (social and emotional development in children) aligns pretty well with what I want to study in graduate school (I just want to focus more on gender socialization). Working with data is just a surprisingly relaxing experience here, in a way it wasn't when I worked in the neuroscience lab. I'm happy here and will hopefully stay in this lab until I graduate.

Music helps a lot, too. Bowerbirds' album "The Clearing" is absolutely perfect for cold and miserable winter days. It has lyrics like, "on and on goes the long winter," but is ultimately hopeful as well - particularly in the song, "Overcome with Light." That's how I'm feeling right now. Winter still has a month or so left in it, and I'm going to make it through. And then it'll be spring, and my soul and body will feel warm again, and I can be the person I need to be for myself and others. It will be a fresh start.
Things will be okay, things will be okay, things will be okay.

"No good times, no bad times,
There's no times at all,
Just The New York Times,
Sitting on the windowsill
 Near the flowers.

We might as well be apart.
It hardly matters,
We sleep separately.

And drop a smile passing in the hall
But there's no laughs left
'Cause we laughed them all.
And we laughed them all
In a very short time.

Time
Is tapping on my forehead,
Hanging from my mirror,
Rattling the teacups,
And I wonder,
How long can I delay?
We're just a habit
Like saccharin.

And I'm habitually feelin' kinda blue.

But each time I try on
The thought of leaving you,
I stop.
I stop and think it over."

-Simon & Garfunkel, "Overs"

Since my grandfather divorced and remarried before I was born and my grandmother never remarried (well, neither Nellie or Billie did - Nellie's husband died a long time before I was born), I've always had three grandmothers and one grandfather.

 My nanny, Nellie, was my only stereotypical grandmother. She gave me candy if I behaved in church, bought me new clothes from J.C. Penney's (even though she always called it "Belk-Tyler's"), played piano, and had chocolate hidden in her house for me. She wore floral dresses and sweatshirts with her church's logo on them, and the worst word I ever heard her say was "shoot," on a day she fell into our television set while trying to walk, again, without her walker.

She loved Jesus, but she never talked about it, even though she went to church twice a week. She always told me it was good to go to church, but never said much beyond that. Now that she's gone, I have her Bible in my bedroom, and when I flip through the pages, it's obvious how serious she was about her religion. On the very first page, in her cursive handwriting, is a note that says, "You never have an experience in life that doesn't draw you closer to God, or cause you to get further from God." Is this how she saw the world all those years?

 She lived, until her Alzheimer's took too much, in West Virginia, in a big white house that smelled like old carpet and popsicle sticks. A house that was filled with puns - a quarter next to a tiny wooden hammer with the words "quarter pounder" written in sharpie, a photo she kept in her wallet of her "pride and joy" - two bottles of house-cleaning products, and a plaque that says "I'm always high, I live in the mountains."

 Billie, another grandmother, is the one who smokes two packs a day - Tahoes - and never learned how to drive. She says "goddamn" more than any person I've ever met, decided she was going to raise a child when she was in her late 60s, writes poetry, loves Obama, and does homework with my little nephew every school day. She was the oldest of a bunch of siblings and the child of parents who died too young. Because of that, she became a mother before she became a high school graduate. She's the queen of "when I was your age" stories, and even though she was probably perpetually hungry growing up, she never makes us eat food we don't like or have room for. (Just save it for the dogs; you don't have to eat it.)

 She's my mother's mother and nearly every day, they sit in Billie's apartment and flip through medical books, talk about their symptoms, and diagnose each other with illnesses - all while chain-smoking.

She grew up in Washington DC and Maryland, and I can still hear the north in her voice when she talks. If I write the word "water" how she says it, it becomes Wort-er.

She is a poet, but she doesn't like poems that rhyme. And she often speaks like a good poem, pointing out the beauty in having your own jar of peanut butter no one will ever put a jelly knife in. 


My last grandmother is the one my grandfather married thirty years ago, Utku, who speaks with a Turkish accent. Utku loves books, and she loves to travel. She's been more places than anyone I know; she's been all over the world and all over America. She loves trying new food, and she identifies as Muslim, although she tells me to never worry too much about religion because it can be a bad thing. 

I used to stay with her and my grandfather for three weeks every summer when I was younger, but it was always more like bootcamp than vacation. If I spoke, it had to be in yes ma'ams and no thank yous. She assigned me a book to read every year and made me write in a journal - made me write about the book and my life- and then she'd read it to make sure I did it. I always had to help with dishes and cleaning and bringing in the nets full of flounder early in the morning. Every night I was required to fix the drinks and set the table, and everything had to be perfect: no forks or knives on the wrong side, no un-matching plates. If I spoke a grammatically incorrect sentence, she refused to acknowledge it until I fixed it. No ain'ts allowed, "they was?"

She also taught me how to paint and took me shopping at craft stores. We'd collect rocks and paint turtles on them to sell at the sea turtle hospital she still works at. We'd find shells at the ocean, only the kind with holes in the top of them, and we'd make our own wind chimes. We'd wake up early in the  morning, right at sunrise, and search the beach for nests of sea turtle eggs that were left there in the night, and then we'd rope them off, to keep them from being stepped on.

Whenever I go to the ocean, I always imagine a globe, and more than that, being ON the globe, at the place where the land meets the ocean and turns into blue. A place like that should be wild, almost holy, like the ocean itself.

It's not. The ocean is saltwater subdivision, divided up and heavily taxed properties, a prime location for gift shops.

Why can't we have just this one thing?

Wedding vowels

I always used to think wedding vows were wedding "vowels," like A, E, I, O, and U. It didn't make sense, but when you're a child, the things adults choose to do with their time never make a lot of sense, anyway.

 Since I love silly things and words and letters and poetry, though, I've decided to compose my own set of wedding vowels.

But don't worry, I'm still a cynic!



A
We will always do what's best for our marriage:
always sit beside each other on city busses,
always add the other's requests to our own grocery lists -
even on the day before thanksgiving,

when it's hard to push a cart without hitting an old man.
Or a shelf trembling from too many boxes of stuffing
being grabbed from it at once.

We'll always do what's best for our marriage,

until the day we need to do what's best for us, 
as whole people
who sometimes need to put a marriage second. For a 
sick sibling, for a trip for work, or for some time alone.

E

Beautiful people are everywhere.

Marriage is not a drain for the hormones
in our bodies,
the serotonin in our heads,
the devices between our legs.

Marriage is a sign that says stop!-
Just as Diana Ross used to sing-
in the name of love. 

Love the one you're with, 
love the one you're with, 
love the one you're with,
love the one you're with.



I

If one of us gets a stomach bug,
even if we're scared,
we'll never stay in a motel.

If we get into an argument,
we'll never be resentful; we'll try not to
yell; and we'll choose our battles wisely:

There are things more important than who
does more to clean the kitchen,
who does more to raise the baby,
and who said the right answer first while
watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

O

Bishop wrote One Art because she knew
losing is the one thing we do,
over and over again, until even our
own lives have been lost from our bodies,


and found in another, if you're buddhist. 
Or found in the sky, if you believe in heaven. 
Or scattered about the earth, in the energy of it all, 
if you're a scientist who knows nothing is 
created or destroyed. 


We'll lose things, too, eventually. 
Our vision, our hair, our memory - 
maybe the things that made us like 
one another - those could leave us, too.

If we know this, though, maybe we can
be prepared. To love through all the losses. 
Or to become a loss ourselves,
if we find that leaving is the better way to love.  

U

Until death do us part.

Or until we change in opposite directions,
and we start to find we're better off
as just ourselves,

not being one flesh anymore,
like the Bible said we'd become.

But flesh hurts to be torn, and even
Eng and Chang Bunker had to be surgically
removed from one another
(but Eng refused - for love), 

and there's no way to take back all the years
we'll spend - no memory-removing device,
except time - with its horse and carriage to pull it
sweetly along -
to make it so we never met.

In a way, this is permanent;
you are permanent,

until death do us part.

Documenting another happy moment!

"We watch and watch and watch these for so long, and when it's all over, all we remember is that they were fireworks." My grandmother said this tonight as we watched fireworks on her porch, and she's right. Now that they're over, all I remember are colors and styles. The golds and reds and greens, the ones that crumble into sparks and the ones that grow out into the night like noodles.

From the porch, it looked like the fireworks were going to fall onto the beach houses and boats that lined the ocean in front of us, but they never did. They always dissolved in the sky before the sparks ever reached a roof. Over and over again, though, I imagined a spark landing on a boat, somewhere near the gas tank, and in my head we'd hear an explosion, see a burning sail, and a fire would be floating on through the water, its owners away watching a better firework show somewhere else.

I'm so happy tonight. I don't know if it's because of the fireworks or because every time I hear them now, I think of my grandmother (who now wants me to call her anne, which is Turkish), or how they sound like the drums of a Bon Iver song. The ocean was so beautiful tonight, and my mom had the teeth that had been hurting her fixed today, and I've gotten so many new books lately, which always make me feel more whole and like myself somehow.

I used to be so happy all the time, like overflowing with happiness, and I want to get back to that.

keep your hand on the door because you know that it
might be a lesson in letting go, 
it might be a lesson in losing the best things,
it might be a lesson in never again 


Chris Pureka