year ago today

One year ago today it is a Monday night. I am sitting on the porch, in the dark, having returned from a weekend in the Adirondacks with my father. All weekend there was sausage, a smoked log of it, and cheese and crackers, and red wine. We were surrounded by mountains but I was thinking about the sausage. It has been three years since I ate meat – not counting one night at the beach that I accidentally ate a bunch of cocktail sauce thickened with anchovy paste, spread on Wheat Thins – and I kept thinking that if I carve off a slice no one has to know. I think about this on the plane flight back, and that Monday night back in Minnesota I sit out on the porch with the B and smoke three cigarettes and think that it is time to renounce vegetarianism. It takes me the better half of a beer to get up the courage to even say the words aloud, because to do so feels like a failing on my part. Or maybe I think that once the words are out there I can’t take them back. As it is, I don’t eat meat for the rest of week because it’s hard enough to incorporate meat back into my grocery list, let alone cook it. It feels too easy to put turkey on a sandwich. It’s September 25, 2006, and I want a steak.

Three years ago today it is a Saturday. I have lived in the Midwest for nearly two months now and still the sky takes me by surprise. It is bright and blue and makes even a Wal-Mart sign look scenic. I am driving around the parking lot with my housemate D, listening to Phish’s “Farmhouse” and the Atmosphere album he has just lent me. D is drinking straight from a recently purchased gallon of skim milk and smoking a cigarette. Last night we went out with some new grad school people and this morning neither of us is entirely sober, but it feels good to drive around town with the windows down and the radio turned up. I like hanging out with D for lots of reasons, one being that he never seems like he wants to be doing anything than what he is presently. This may explain a little bit why he is a fifth-year senior. Everything out here is unfamiliar: strange accents, different bars, first days and weeks of teaching, a new guy. It’s enough to simply wake up on a Saturday morning with the type of hangover that sharpens the horizon and drive around town with D. It’s September 25, 2004, and I am pretending to know what I am doing.

Five years ago today it is a Thursday. I am sitting on the couch with my best college friend Colleen listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” and smoking in our rental house despite the lease expressively forbidding it. Our third roommate is home in Buffalo for the weekend. She is home in Buffalo every weekend because she visits her boyfriend who she is trying to get engaged to. Colleen and I do not want to be engaged for years and years; we are drinking cheap wine and listening to people below our window walk on their way downtown. The night is warm, and many of the girls walking by are wearing tank tops, but those two facts happen to coincide. In three months, when it is seventy degrees colder, the same girls will be wearing the same shirts. I have spent the week sitting at the kitchen table filling out graduate school applications, looking at a map and trying to imagine where the next year will be spent. I spend a lot of nights with Colleen at the pseudo-Irish pub down the street, where the bartender has a thing for her and we stay past close, helping him turn off the neon signs and drinking free Molson Canadian. Next semester we graduate. I have learned that I like to write poems. It is September 25, 2002 and I have no idea where I go from here.