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 I realize now that it doesn't have a title...oh well. Sorry I was so nervous ladies (and Paul)! Thanks for being so welcoming. Here it is:

It started with index cards, spread out on the bed, pink and lined with the future spreading out past their cardboard edges on to the sheets and off them into the weeks ahead. It seemed so random, random that’s something Paul used to talk about, but we’ll come back to that later, he told us that too, we’ll get back to it later. 

Look, the point is I was picking a freshman writing a seminar and I was ranking all 27 options with pros and cons and they were stacked into no piles and yes piles and maybe piles like this was the only fucking thing that mattered that summer, like I wasn’t scared to leave, like my grandfather wasn’t dying, like a brother I realized I didn’t know wasn’t suddenly home, on the couch again, like nothing had changed since I was eleven years old.  Those piles meant I was calm and confident and logical and dealing with things responsibly. They meant I was ready to get the hell out of a green house that had always been blue and off to a big stone castle in pennsylvania. 

It was my second choice out of three, neither spectacularly lucky, nor miserably unfortunate. It had the longest title of any other seminar.

Making, 

we were sitting in that room day after day creating, building, sticking together with glue a community and an understanding and a language and a culture.

Sense,

Knowledge, perception, comprehending

Of Ourselves.

Belonging to, our very own, in a place where I had nothing, where even my things weren’t mine because they had been stripped vulnerable and bare of their contextual meaning, in a place completely unfamiliar and more terrifying than I could have ever admitted we were making something that was ours, something we could keep, so on those stupid homesick nights when I was digging into the sheets for sleep, I could wrap my arms around our conversations, tangle them up with my fingers into knots, some I could untie, and some I couldn’t but that was okay, because hey, we were coming back to that, Paul promised.

In an Evolving Universe

Because we were all changing, we’re still all changing, and Paul said most of that change was random, and I couldn’t undo that knot for the longest time. I’m not as open minded as I say, I was taking scissors to the fibrous mess that was our class, I was cheating and trying to get away without learning, but I changed. Because that’s what you do instead of giving up when you’ve tried every other loop hole, poking your head through desperately searching for the other side of getting this. This class had no loop holes. You had to break yourself a thousand times, lay out the pieces and suture them back together carefully like maybe this time would be the last time until the following week when someone said something that made you wrap around yourself clinging to the pieces like fucking please I just got finished figuring this all out. We never let each other be finished, we pushed and we pulled and we unraveled seams until no one could say they hadn’t changed their mind at least once. Hell, our class modo was mind fuck. We were proud of it, proud to have tortured one another into frustrated reality questioning morality denying cynics. 

An Experiment

It sure fucking was. I mean it seemed like half the time no one knew what the class was even about and people would ask me and I couldn’t answer. And that was a knot I had to learn to leave tangled. My fingers stroking these filaments of thought, letting them be, letting them twine and complicate and enrich me with the infinite possibility for intricacy they contained. 

In Open-Ended 

I know that I started off closed and ended open and if that needed to happen without a road map that’s okay by me. I could spend a few hours a week blind, driving down the high way at full speed, a passenger I didn’t know whispering directions through white noise and yes that is a metaphor that doesn’t really make sense, and yes that is how I felt at times and yes, feeling like that was an experience I wouldn’t trade back. 

Co-construction,

Which is linguistic terminology, just so you all know, it means finishing someone’s sentence, like walking into their brain and pulling their ideas out and spreading them around on the carpet until they’re something everyone could touch, could share, like staring across the table in the basement of dalton hall and realizing finally that even though you’ve never been able to hear this person before you can predict exactly, in that moment, what they are about to say, because you grew together in the same way from one itching, bursting towards the sunlight, picture on our classes website, seed. I guess it’s over folks, where do you think it’s gonna lead?