A thank-you letter to the universe

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ''If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'" K.V.

• The other day when Aimee Nezhukumatathil came to my little poetry class, she described her book Lucky Fish as a thank-you letter to the universe,  an "eff you" to anyone who's told her she should be more negative in her writing.
• Spring is here and warming everything, and I finally got to leave my chemistry troubles behind for good.
•  Such a huge part of my spring semester has consisted of reading poetry, listening to others read poetry, writing poetry, and falling in love with poetry.
•  I saw Bradley Hathaway last night and experienced beauty in a way that I hadn't since 2009, beauty that made me feel like I could possibly have faith in a god again or at the very least, in the world.
• I know beautiful people. 
• My spring break will be nomadic, a lot of it spent outdoors with people who make me happy.

 The more I think about it, the more I think redemption!

Winter was awful, a mess of uncertainty - perpetual struggling to keep up my grades, to memorize five classes worth of psychological studies and vocabulary words and statistical rules. Wondering whether or not my mom's treatments will work, learning how anxiety medications or some other mysterious thing can hurt a relationship, wanting to be creative but not having time and because of that, simply being sad.

All that is over now - at least until Fall - and I just wanted to write a post acknowledging my happiness, as Kurt Vonnegut asked us all to do. If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

There's also a poem by Aimee Nezhukumatathil that makes me extra happy. It's called "Baked Goods," and it's the first love poem she wrote to her husband. At the time they lived in their first house together, a fixer-upper next door to cranky old people who had a meth lab in their basement. As someone with a dysfunctional life, it's nice to see dysfunction turned into something so charming:

Baked Goods

Flour on the floor makes my sandals

slip and I tumble into your arms.

Too hot to bake this morning but

blueberries begged me to fold them

into moist muffins. Sticks of rhubarb

plotted a whole pie. The windows

are blown open and a thickfruit tang

sneaks through the wire screen

and into the home of the scowly lady

Who lives next door. Yesterday, a man

in the city was rescued from his apartment

that was filled with a thousand rats

something about being angry because

his pet python refused to eat. He let the bloom

of fur rise, rise over the little gnarly blue rug,

over the coffee table, the kitchen countertops

and pip through each cabinet, snip

at the stumpy paper bags of sugar,

the cylinders of salt. Our kitchen is a hot mess—

a riot of pots, wooden spoons, melted butter.

So be it. Maybe all this baking will quiet

The angry voices next door, if only

For a brief whiff. I want our summers

to always be like this—a kitchen wrecked

with love, a table overflowing with baked goods
warming the already warm air. After all the pots

are stacked, the goodies cooked, and all the counters
wiped clean - let us never be rescued from this mess.