"she puts her hands against / the life she had"

It is late. Newly showered, with my short-shorn curls drying erratically around my ears, I keep the watch as eight thirteen-year old girls squirm about on their beds, allegedly trying to sleep.

I am living, for the moment, in an enclave of brick and marble and lawn, with maybe fifty middle school students in the middle of northern nowhere, Massachusetts. I am alternately their reading/writing instructor, their bananagrams adversary, and the one who forces it by ensuring solitary shower time and prompt compliance with rules. Each night, I collapse on my springy mattress utterly spent.

And as I so often do, I turn my gaze inward to make an inquiring sweep of my landscape, finding myself again amused and surprised by where I exist. I’ve just set aside a novel about piracy and time travel and romance, and find that the waves that crash and swell inside my own life, though perhaps of smaller amplitude than those in my book, rock me about as concretely as if I were one of its colorful characters. My own story continues to shock and thrill me, proving itself of greater adventure than if I had crafted it myself. I am, however, pleased to report significantly less mortal peril than that faced in the novel. Possibly also less sex. It's a pretty great book.

I have not written here – really written -- for some time. I am hard-pressed to explain this, other than to say that sometimes it is possible to live outside of yourself long enough that you forget your voice. I am coming back to mine, inviting it to hold my hand and walk forward with me in the open (not just releasing it from its basket under the stairs every few months for a frolic and then prompt re-containment).

For the last few years, I have been seduced by the specter of a Noble Life, and have silenced the Life that wishes to live in me. No matter how I try to corral my own story, submerge it in water like so much bamboo and train it into a shape that looks like those of people I so admire, the life that wants to live in me is unwilling to bend thus. It may be noble, in the end. Or not. But whatever it is, I am trying to unclench my fists and jaws… stop fighting, stop silencing. Whatever life I’m left with, post-MATCH, it will be my own.

To speak plain, I have finished my job. I am working in a one-month summer intensive program. And after that, I have no idea. No job. But my heart is open and clear, and I know who I am. Perhaps I will write more here, because I am no longer afraid of writing my way into truths I cannot face.

Goodnight, friends. I have missed you. And I have missed myself. But I am back.