pleased to be lonesome, quiet, and clear

I ate my last meal in England at a small Italian restaurant in Heathrow, where I sat alone at a table. I ordered a mushroom pizza and a glass of coke. I remember there was a wedge of lime in the coke, about three ice cubes. I remember the pizza being very good. I remember looking at this loneliness as one loneliness in a long queue of others that I just had to get through. It was just a moment like that, that you take as it comes, you deal with it, you eat your pizza at the small silver table on your own with a glass of coke that has a lime wedge in it. You pay a little bit of attention to the couple next to you as they help each other finish their meals, but not too much. You don’t cry. You don’t take off your hat, either. Your backpack is underneath your legs, topped with the box that has your mother’s Christmas present in it, a Wedgewood teacup from Harrod’s. When you can’t finish your pizza you leave what's left at the table with a tip, feeling a bit apologetic. You want to say, I loved that pizza. I loved that coke with a wedge of lime in it. But this is your last meal in England, you have a backpack full of Christmas presents and a Wedgewood teacup. You’re alone in an airport. You’re about to go home after three months of loneliness that you’re not sure you’ll ever be able to explain to anyone. This is a drop in a river. 

cento

Were you ever a ripple 

at the edge of yourself?

I turn to hear the sea

in the wind.

Gods eat the moon periodically--

somebody clawed a womb

apart and found we came hard

breathing from sea.

I can tell you. Once I was

moon and sun

and I went about myself.

Maps of our bodies and 

oceans coincide.

compiled from James Kimble's 

The Light the World Appears In

late may

Today, talking with a friend, I said, “I don’t know who I am right now.” I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I spent abroad--it’s been six months that I’ve been home, and realizing it aches. It hurts. I’m glad to be with people who matter to me. I’m glad to be at school. I’m glad to be where I am, in intense bursts. I’m glad I’ve met who I’ve met. I’ve been reintroduced to beauty, to goodness, to just enough reality to paralyze me out of choosing. Where will you go? I don’t know. What will you do? I don’t know. What will you write? ... I don’t know.

When I was in Paris, it was near Christmas, and walking down the Champs-Elysees in cold, wet shoes, after having gotten rained on heavily, mercilessly, after having gotten lost for two hours in the city looking for the Eiffel Tower, I felt like the light reflecting off water caught in gutters after the downpour. I loved the smell of wine in the air, warm, earthy, spiced for the season. I felt like things could grow out of the air, drop from the sky. Appear out of stars. Things could rearrange around me, air could be a cocoon for me. I felt comfortable; myself. I felt as though, walking the old streets, naive and moon-faced, I could slouch my way to heaven. There is a contentedness that beats deep in the heart, and for one night in Paris, it was mine. 

Sometimes I am suffocated by the force of my own want, what will not stop. That every small thing I do on purpose might be done to be known more. I returned home from school after having a poem workshopped the other day, and exited the car, stood in the middle of the street. I couldn’t tell if I was disappointed in myself or my writing. If I was confused in myself or my writing. Have I lost hope in myself, or in my writing? Do I not see myself going anywhere, or do I not see my writing going anywhere? I don’t know. But I know I’m willing to stare into darkness. Something is always emerging in it, of it, folding it into something, someone is always good to show me what’s in it.  The secret to islands, I wrote while in England, is that there’s an ocean floor.

I think I am the one who feels too much, who admires aimlessly, selfishly, who revisits and revisits life after it has happened out of some need to rearrange, to steep, to arrive at an undeserved peace. 

I’m sorry I haven’t written in so long. I’m revisiting London in stories. I graduate in a year. A year to cure my skin, so I can do something new, so I can take real steps to a real place and maybe become somebody, if only to myself. It’s been six months since I was abroad but I am abroad every day. I think I’m going to be abroad forever, at least a little bit. 

early march

I’d love to be the first to admit that it’s been far too long since I’ve posted anything here, but I can’t claim to be the first to admit to that, as it’s really my dad who brings it up with admirable regularity. There are a lot of things I should write about. I should write about Paris, or London. I should write another list about words that the British pronounce alarmingly differently from us, or about the flight home, about my making it all the way to Heathrow before breaking my Stanford-upon-Avon coffee pot bought for three quid at an antique store in Norwich. 

But instead I’m going to write about home. I’ve been home since just before Christmas. I’ve learned the word mansuetude lately. It describes Irvine well--a sort of planned gentleness, some unsatisfying prettiness--but not my feelings for the city. I’ve been commuting for over a year now almost forty miles a day. Irvine feels close to San Juan, now, almost like I’ve never travelled. But the hours spent in the car are as much a part of me as the hours spent in class, or at work. I remember nights after eighth period my last year of high school turning onto San Juan Creek Road in the dark, staring up at a heavy yellow moon, writing poetry. I wrote poems line by line and spoke the lines aloud until I had them memorized. When I got home I’d write them down. During the last two years of high school I wrote over five hundred poems. I look back at them sometimes, mostly to remind myself that I’ve changed incredibly since then and so (thankfully) has my writing. I couldn’t ever look back and pinpoint a moment of change, perhaps. Or change doesn’t happen in moments, but stretched out over time and slowly. I think I’ve had to work for some growth. Other of it has been God-given. Some of it’s by luck, or my own determination. 

My parents had some old friends over the other night. They asked me about England and I found it exhausting to talk about. Maybe because I find it difficult to tell a story whilst being consistently and boisterously interrupted, or having portions of the story told for me. But mostly I think it’s because something happened to me while I was there that I can’t say out loud, and not just because I’m selfishly choosy with whom I choose to share the most precious details: but because I don’t know how to say it. But that’s not the point of this post.

Irvine is a luminous place in the first months of Summer. The sun is still white, sifting through low clouds. The grey hills and light grasses are soft. The air smells like grass, sweet, nutty. People start to smell like suntan lotion or tropical scent. The old spice wearers bear their armpits to the breeze. I invest in a gas mask. I love Irvine like home. Not because the city’s straight lines and clean pavements suggest to me the capacity of mankind, or the hills off the highway remind me of a childhood spent hiking neighborhood hills and playing with the cat in the woodsy backyard.  I love Irvine because I’ve felt so trapped amongst its yuppie streets and shopping centers that I couldn’t do anything but turn to literature, to poetry, to writing stories. I’ve felt so strange, so out of place, like I’m restricted from the knowledge that would allow me to fit in, to be friendlier, more graceful, more beautiful, better accomplished. Resistance to Irvine’s corporate, business-casual charm, has caused me to emerge from some sort of social cemetery victorious, pages and pages of prose and verse clutched in my closed fists. The writing’s getting better. I’m learning to love it more. I’m learning to listen. To tell a story. To write something that matters. Something that lasts. The act of writing puts something down on paper irrevocably, or maybe onto a computer screen. I can’t untype anything. I can’t unsay anything. But what makes literature immortal is that other people read it and become it. I’ve written to friends about this idea I’ve had, that there’s a way to read something so deeply and intensely that you become what you read. That you write what you read. I can’t make it make sense yet; I don’t have the language. But I think it’s true, and I think that’s why the authors everyone knows have written stories that matter timelessly. What’s true, remains. 

I’ve always turned to poetry. My parents had friends over the other night: I mentioned this already. I told them about England. I felt uncomfortable about it. I felt a pressure to tell the story in a way that I thought could matter to someone else. I spend a lot of time alone; I have some difficulty understanding where the boundaries lie between what I find meaningful and what other people do. With some difficulty I told my story. We came to talking about my writing: I was deeply embarrassed when Mom pulled out a poem I’d illustrated and given to her for Christmas one year to show her friends as an example of what I write, because it’s two years old, and I’m so wildly different now--my writing is so wildly different now--that I don’t feel what they read is a good representative of my writing or who I am. But I think they understood that it was old, and I couldn’t tell them they couldn’t read it. I didn’t know if my embarrassment was appropriate, or allowed. I tried to swallow it down. It dissipated. They were gracious. I think they actually did appreciate the poem. I think when you reach a certain maturity you’re probably able to genuinely appreciate things much less than masterpieces.

We talked about what I write. I told them, I write fiction for school and poetry privately. One of the two writes songs and asked me if I ever did. I said, yes, and he asked if I also wrote the melody, and I told him, not at the same time that I write the words. The words first and then the melody. That mattered to me, to make that distinction. I thought that made it clear that I’m not a songwriter. I think in music, the melody is inextricable from the words. The way the song sounds and works musically isn’t separate from the way that the words work. The words and melody both work in the same listening moment, they both tell a story, and work together. So I thought, songwriters must write them both, words and melody, with some thought as to the other. And I said, I’ve written songs, but I’m not a songwriter.

He said, if you’ve written songs, you’re a songwriter.

I didn’t agree. I don’t think I do now, either. That’s a gracious point of view.  I am not a songwriter. I am not a fiction writer. I do not even think I am a poet. I think I’m an intense journaler. I’m an aspiring poet, yes. But not one now. I suppose I abide by the Platonic ideal: you can do one thing really well, and many things sort of well. Plato says, many things badly, but I think most people are multi-talented. I also think that both normal people (of which I’m one) and gifted people are born, or can choose, but they are something. You’re a doctor or a mathemetician or a musician or a soccer player, and you can do other things, but at your core, you’re something. Maybe I misunderstood what he meant. Maybe he meant it literally. A songwriter is someone who writes songs. But I was talking spiritual, maybe out of place. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it for the last few days, and it’s made me think about where I am now. It’s more specific than the US, than California, than Irvine. I’m at UCI and I’m in the creative writing program and it’s frustrating, it’s trying, it’s exhausting, but it’s thrilling and rewarding and it’s gotten me to, and through, the best and worst moments of the last two and a half years of my life. I’m a creative writer inhabiting a creative writing program. As stifling as Irvine is to me at times, it’s also the only place I’ve ever had the experience of feeling truly at home, in my own right.

You’re having...what...for breakfast?

In my last post I promised a list of food in British and American terminology. I’m sure more will emerge as I remember them, but here’s a list I sat compiling in the food court at Castle Mall the other day. In no particular order besides the one that I thought them up in.

British	American
porridge	oatmeal
jacket potato	baked potato
soured cream	sour cream
chips	french fries / fries
crisps	chips (particularly potato chips)
bangers & mash	sausages and mashed potatoes
courgette	zucchini
aubergine	eggplant
rocket	arugula
coriander	parsley
jelly	jell-o
tea	dinner / supper (depending on context and geography)
“american style”	greasy or giant
lemonade	sprite-like sparkling lemon soft drink
cloudy lemon	lemonade
soya	soy
dippy eggs	soft-boiled eggs in which the yolk is still runny. they often dip “soldiers” (strips of toast) into these. “dippy eggs and soldiers” is a common breakfast menu item
ice lolly	popsicle
bubble and squeak	potato-cabbage hash
bap	hamburger bun
rump steak (I admit I giggled at this for a while)	sirloin
squash	citrus soft drink
boiled sweets	hard candy
sultana	GIANT RAISIN
cornflower	cornstarch
desiccated coconut (you did what to my coconut??)	flaked coconut
fairy cake	cupcake
ginger nut biscuit	ginger snap cookie
mince	ground meat
plain chocolate	dark chocolate
sweetcorn	corn
toffee	taffy
treacle	molasses
biscuit	crispy / non-soft cookie
butty	sandwich made with whitebread, mayo, and ANYTHING between the bread
candy floss	cotton candy
gammon	ham steak
pudding	dessert / sweet after-main course at dinner
beetroot	beet
chocolate vermicelli	chocolate sprinkles (when I found out this one, it just...why? THEY’RE SPRINKLES. THEY’RE AN EASY CONCEPT. the word sprinkles is what you do to them why vermicelli)
Demerara sugar	brown cane sugar. you can find packets of it at all coffee shops
polony	bologna (I thought this one looked like a disease word)

a vegetarian in the UK

Besides saving me from the horror of slicing into a piece of my food and seeing a blood vessel or chunk of gristle in an inappropriate place (such as: piece of edible food), being a vegetarian has also caused me a fair share of stress, particularly when I was first applying to study abroad. I didn’t know what it would be like for me in the UK, food-wise, and I worried that not being able to find something to eat would hinder my social integration. Hint: what social integration???

I started trying to eat fish over the summer: each time I tried some I suffered from varying degrees of pain and strange symptoms like feeling very warm and light-headed in addition to the regular pains of not being able to digest something. I worried for a while that it’d hurt every time I ate it, but canned tuna didn’t bother me, so I kept eating that until I departed for London in mid-september.

It was surprisingly easy to find vegetarian food once I’d gotten here--easier than at home with regards to pre-packaged sandwiches, salads, and pastas. Everything here that contains no animal product is labeled with a “V” that is sometimes accompanied by the phrase “suitable for vegetarians.” It’s on everything: crisps, soups, candies. It was completely opposite to my expectations, but that’s probably because I was expecting traditional British food to be the predominant locatable food.

That’s not always the case. Restaurants are good, here, about having and labeling vegetarian options on all of their menus. I thought I’d take a moment to describe some good meals that I had, mostly for fun, but the side-benefit of it is that if you’re a veg thinking of coming to the UK, you’ll know a few places around the country that’ll have good food (;

(Before you look at the prices and make some understandable judgements: people don’t tip in the UK for meals like they do in America because the tip (VAT) is already included in the price of the meal when you order it eat-in. If you order takeaway this price doesn’t apply to your meal and it’s cheaper.)

Herby Mushrooms on Toast (£6.30), Number 33 Café, Norwich

This is a thick piece of home-made rosemary and sea-salt bread, covered with mushrooms in what must be rosemary and other spices, a thick layer of wilted “rocket” (arugula to Americans), and topped with a poached egg. It’s served with two plum-sized roasted tomatoes, but I didn’t eat those. This is probably the best breakfast that I’ve had in the UK, and I’m pretty sure it’s a traditional British breakfast.

Courgette + Pepper Quiche (£6.45), Jarrold’s Café Benjamin, Norwich

In Britain, zucchini masquerades under its French name. Then Café Benjamin puts it into little individual quiches and adds red peppers to it and serves it with a side-salad and seasoned chips. The chips are half of there reason that I order this meal, besides the fact that Café Benjamin is located in an up-scale department store and the environment is very pleasant.

Spinach and Potato Curry with basmati steamed rice and roti (£5), Indian food stall at The Stables in Camden Town by “We Love Pizza” and Bubble tea stalls, London

This was possibly the best meal I have had the whole time I’ve been here with the exception of the Herby Mushrooms for breakfast. I love Indian food, and this is comparatively cheap for other Indian food I’ve had here, and I absolutely 100% think that roti are on my top 5 list of breads in the whole world and I am a bread person. I ordered a regular-size order which included a small aluminum tray of steamed basmati rice and a lot of spinach and potatoes and cost £4, and bought the roti for £1. This meal’s leftovers became my dinner that night. If you’re ever in The Stables and like Indian food, you need to eat here! I’m sorry I can’t remember what it’s called, but you’ll see the pizza place next to it. 

Spicy Veggie Sandwich Meal (£4.45), MacDonald’s

You can find MacDonald’s (Macker’s) pretty much anywhere in the UK, especially in malls. There are two within five-minutes walking distance in the Norwich city centre, but I’ve only been to the one in the mall before. Anyway, the concept of MacDonald’s having a sandwich for me to eat was completely foreign (SEE WHAT I DID THERE) to me because we don't’ have any main vegetarian dishes at really any fast food restaurants where I live in California, and where I live in California is full of veggies like me. The Spicy Veggie Sandwich is basically a long bread-roll filled with puck-like veggie patties (that to me tasted like greek-style falafel and were delicious), cucumber slices, iceberg lettuce, and a sweet chili sauce. It’s very good, and was especially so the first time I had it after walking toward the Golden Arches expecting to have fries and a coke for lunch.

Tofu Panini (£6) and Sweet Potato Chips with chili mayonnaise (£2.20) at Pulse Café & Bar, Norwich

You can order this sandwich as a wrap or as a bruschetta, but I prefer the panini style, which is different than what an American would expect when ordering a panini: in the UK panini refers to a heated open-faced sandwich (and the term “toastie” refers to a pressed, hot sandwich that we’d call a panini in America). This one is full of smoked tofu, tomato slices, iceberg lettuce, cheddar cheese and barbecue sauce and is very difficult to eat knife-and-fork as is the British way, so I picked it up and ate it with my hands, American-style. I ordered it with my favorite snack/side-order to be found in the city (by...me, anyway), thick-cut sweet potato chips (re: fries, if you’re American) that they serve with a chili or garlic mayo dip. Chili is my favorite, and I don’t like spicy things, so anyone could handle this level of heat. This mayo isn’t like the stuff you scoop out of plastic jugs with a spoon and get all over your finger-tips when it’s time to get a new batch, either; it’s denser somehow and stands up to being a dip for these chips. I love sweet-potato fries, but these ones were baked and crispy rather than fried, so that I could eat more of them they were healthier. Remember to ask for salt for them, though! 

P.S. everything at Pulse Cafe & Bar is vegetarian, but there are also vegan and gluten-free options on the menu. They serve a range of gluten-free cakes and treats.

American-Style Pancakes (£6.40), Number 33 Café, Norwich

These aren’t really American-style; they’re not those fluffy, inch-thick clouds that you associate with square, yellow pats of butter and Aunt Jemima’s. They’re more like a hybrid crepe-pancake and are a bit chewy, but they’re wonderful anyway and they come with a small pot of syrup and a cup of fresh fruit, including raspberries, which are a favorite of mine.

Traditional Greek Salad (£3.49), Number 33 Café, Norwich

I ordered this as a take-away meal recently--it’d be a bit more expensive to eat in-house--and it’s a mix of calamata and green olives, feta cheese, cherry tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, red onions, rocket and other greens. It has a sweetish vinaigrette on it and there’s a good ratio of cheese to the rest of the salad, which, in my experience, is not always the case.

Veggie Burger Meal (£5.45), Burger King

You can find Burger King not as easily as “Macker’s” but it’s in most of the malls and in some big railway stations in London. This is also a chick-pea-base but there’s more beans and corn and carrots in there than I could tell in the MacDonald’s equivalent. The bun often fell apart on me while eating these, but there are worse things (like ordering a side-salad and fries). 

Mushy Pea Soup (£4.95), Giraffe, Norwich

There are Giraffe’s everywhere. Apparently, they’re lower-class chain restaurants, but I had a very nice starter-course soup for dinner there my first night in Norwich. They serve it with a couple pieces of garlicky bread. 

Look out for a future post in which I enlighten some of you on the terms I learned for food here and how they differ to American equivalents.

06 December 2012

It’s 11:01 P.M. on December 6th and rain is pounding occasionally on the window. It sounds like fingertips over a hard surface in rapid tattoo. 

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to blog. I feel like I’ve been floating through my life lately, overcome in certain corners of the city or the UEA campus by love for the surrounding, for the country, for the idea that I’ve intercepted a dream with my body. I think this is why it’s been difficult to write. I’ve been in the mood to curl up and watch the snow fall, or the rain, wrapped in a blanket, and think without self-mediating. It’s not easy not to self-mediate when you’re writing out your thoughts and you can see what you’re thinking or who you are in certain glimmers.

A week from today I will have been in London for about twelve hours and I will have left Norwich behind. Perhaps for good. My heart really hurts at that possibility. Amidst all the throws of homesickness I think I found comfort in the trees and large lawns and the churches and the small-town mentality of the busses, which run on whatever schedule they please. This country has been, contrary to logic, in my heart for so much of my life and part of me wants to go back and start over, have another chance in another life where I’m smarter, more graceful, better-equipped to encounter all that the country has to offer, the people and the traditions and the weird food and the strange mentality that every British person seems to share that there is intense comfort and delight to be found in small things: a good cup of tea, a sunny day, a hot meal. 

And I look back, too, wondering, or almost wondering, about how it would have been like for me here if I were any different than who I was when I got here and I’m overcome with an overwhelming fear that this experience could be taken from me. At the base of it, underneath all my self-doubt and the boredom and the strangeness and uncomfortableness of being beyond familiar turf, I have had an amazing time here and I’m loathe to leave. I’ve packed the bulk of my things but I’ve left out litter--bus tickets, makeup, perfume, tea cups, everything--I think because it makes me sad to consider leaving. These little things are signals that I still belong in this place. My journal in the left-hand corner of this desk is definitely mine, and belongs on this surface, at least for a little while longer.

I am really looking forward to being home but I feel, while walking around Norwich for the last few days I’m here in conceivably forever, a strange nostalgia and a desperation to spend the last few days well. It’s a grasping at the current moment inside of the current moment and it really hurts. I can’t tell what parts of it are regret--wishes that I’d spent a bit more time having coffee at the riverside--and what parts of it are regular sadness at departing from a wonderful portion of life. The feeling reminds me a little of the way I felt walking across the football field at high school graduation, except I may have loved this place more intensely in individual moments than I loved high school. 

I think most people would end this kind of post with a list of things they’re thankful for about the trip and it might look like this: the friends I made, the memories I made, etc. Many exclamation points and saccharine reminiscences.

My list is not that list. This is the first real thing I’ve ever actually accomplished outside of the realm of scholarship and I feel, for the first time in my life, like I’m not staring into the abyss of real life without some tools to defend myself with. Sometimes when I consider the reality of what I’ve done--how far I actually am from home physically--I almost don’t believe it. How did I manage to get myself over here? How did I fly to a country in which I’d never set foot in and live here for three months on my own? How did I feed myself, how did I manage to tuck in the tags that stuck up in the back of my shirts or jumpers, how did I take a train to a different country, how did I fly to Dublin and back, how did I learn how to stand on the tube, how am I still alive, here, so far away, on my own? How is it possible that I’ve detached from home and lived a life apart from it? I’ve never done that. I go to a college thirty minutes up the freeway from my childhood home and I live there in the school year. The cat I’ve had since I was five is still my best friend. I’m closer to my parents than any people my age. And I’ve left all of that behind and I’ve done something that I just really can’t wrap my head around when I think about the probability of me being able to do it. 

I know I’ll come home in a couple weeks and, apart from being happy for dry climates and the familiar scents of San Juan Capistrano and Irvine in the sunshine, in the heat, and the brief spastic showers that we call rain; I know I will still be a house of insecurities all kind of shaking around inside of me and I’ll still be the same girl in the same skin with the same worries. But I will also have these three months of fending for myself and having to really interrogate my beliefs and habits and lifestyle. I’m an introvert--I like spending time alone. I enjoy that privacy. But to spend the greater part of three months with myself and my brain and my illogical heart with its intense bursts of love for unnamable things in the air or across the lakes or the countryside visible from the train windows or the small patches of little white flowers in the Scottish hills--has been exhausting. I am accountable only to myself. 

But I think I’ve learned a lot--in things I can’t quite say. I know now some concrete things: like, you’re able to understand public transportation. You’re able to ride a train by yourself to Edinburgh and you’re able to get yourself safe when stranded in Northumberland at midnight. You can buy your own groceries and not die of malnutrition. You can buy your own medicine and nurse yourself out of a mid-term cold. And you can accept who you’ve become in the quiet and the still moments of your life. You can be at peace with that inner turbulence and longing and you can make sense of some things that happen and you can really, if you want to, be an optimist. 

And I think--I don’t know, I think I’ve learned how to be grateful. I seem to feel things in flashes, and I feel grateful in flashes, really deep, right in the chest. It’s incredible--I really can’t comprehend the opportunity I’ve been given and I hope that, even if I don’t know until I’m home and I’m remembering, I’ve taken advantage of it. I hope I can use this experience to somehow bless other people. I feel I’ve learned things I can’t yet understand. There’s this idea that sometimes we encounter knowledge or art that we’re not ready for yet, that someday we’ll perfect. I think this has been one of those things; every day has been full of those things. 

I was lying in bed earlier tonight looking around me at the suitcases and the scant bookshelves and the circular sticker on the top right corner of my mirror that says “THE GRASSHOPPER - AMSTERDAM” that was here when I got here and I remembered walking through a part of town called “the Royal Arcade” and encountering a lone man singing in a clear, beautiful voice, a song in Latin. I don’t know what it was, but it touched me deeply, and I looked up at the grey, stone edifice of Norwich Castle opposite me, up on a hill, and thought--how bizarre! That I’m here! And I stood for a moment in front of the outdoor stage in a small ampitheatre near the castle, read some plaques, walked to the castle mall foodcourt and ordered a vegetarian sandwich. I sat and watched three teenagers dissect a baked potato (jacket potato) at a neighboring table against the backdrop of white skies and the rooftops of city buildings, and another far-off mall. It was a beautiful, perfect day. I remember it in sea-glass greens and gradient gray, the undersides of clouds and the white sky lit behind by the sun.

I look forward to a lot of things about home; seeing my family, having Christmas together, going back to school and work...but I think I also look forward to seeing how this self re-encounters my past self’s life. I’m not saying I’m a different person in a large enough way that I’ll be living in a stranger’s routine until it becomes mine again. I just wonder--when I look at the lights on the Christmas tree, are they going to remind me of the lights flat 20 hung in the kitchen next door that I can see from far away when I walk home from class in the dark?--a soft, yellowing light, in a string of speckles across the dark glass above a hand-written sign: HAPPY CHRISTMAS