The Sound of Settling
Sometimes, it breaks your heart just remembering how much you love them.
SG with his muscle car and greaser hairdo, this laugh that brings his whole face together like the sun shining.
SD with his eco-punk ways, tonight dawning a shirt that said, “Cancer! Everybody dies!” and yet, when you leave he says, “Goodnight, beautiful woman,” because he is just that sort of man who can say this to every woman and mean it.
JS with his quiet determination, his dreams the size of his silence—enough to fill a warehouse with ironwork.
KK with her sultry half-buzzed I-know-what-you’re-thinking gaze, that too-too heart-smart look of a woman who has felt half a life of hurt in just two decades.
AA with her snort laugh and pencil-thin arms, tan like a Jamaican and all the wide-eyed dreams of a woman in love on the fast track.
NT with her Queens moxy and studio potter timidity, all leveled out with the most badass sense of what-next and who-for I’ve ever seen.
ZLo with his getting’-grown-up look about him, finally a true and steady love at his side, grad school on the horizon but still…that ever-present boy that smiles and plays and laughs with the rest of them, setting the standard for spontaneity.
This is only to name a few of the beautiful people that come together to make life here in the broader community of the craft school the social adventure that it is.
I’m pushing. Been leaning so hard into life for a good while now, and just a week or so more to go before all the paperwork for the MFA is in, all three essays for art magazines written for the month, all 17 submissions for the lit mag read, all the thank-you cards written and bills paid or at least good enough for now, and yes, all SEVEN books read in the month of May. It’s been a bruiser in the best way possible, if one can imagine that, and it’s nights like tonight—despite the rain, despite everyone’s spring-fever fatigue, despite the distance and the gas costs, despite, despite—when we all come together for food and drink and it just feels like home.
