About ten hours into a journey across an incomprehensible
distance, already past a large chunk of the meadows and woods,
most of the trampolines behind trailers I think, some amount of
the small city halls, libraries, community centers, all of the
southern churches with whitewashed siding. It was a good thing
that I ended up taking this route, gasping as a flock of birds
swerved all alike through a steelyard, as a huge river opened
up underneath me, as a quaint historic downtown strip featured
a ramshackle New York Hi Fashion back in Rocky Mount, North
Carolina. It has made the distance more—and then
less—realizable. Even moreso that driving—which is
primarily interstate driving in my travails—the land
you've passed is so tangibly real chunks of space: two old men
on their porch, a tree house left open like a cross section
facing the train tracks (sparking the story wisps of a boy who
grew up able to sit & watch the trains go by, perhaps
dreaming of the other places they came from and went to, very
distant from his life and his neighborhood, but more likely
loving the train more abstractly, as all little boys love
trucks, trains, big things that make noise, and gaining
some sort of relief and appeasement as he sat and his treehouse
rumbled, as he watched complacent strangers' faces flash by,
more people on each passing passenger train than the population
of the town he lives in, and he likes something about glimpsing
a speck of these people's lives... it is only once he is old
enough—but not quite old enough—to bring girls to his
tiny secret spot that he realizes that sometimes they are
taking away a snippet of something that is his), a school bus
rotting in a backyard, filled with old rotting junk that was
once just being put there for safekeeping. These are
components that lives revolve around, that we come to be made
from. It slowly and subtly highlights the magnitude of choices
that lie in between lives that seem fated to follow a path set
& chosen without input from the participants—scripts
that can so easily be thrown out, but rarely are because it
seems so irresponsible to do so, because the unknown could be
better, but the chance that it could be worse is pitiful.
Though.
The unknown is addictive. And it is terrifying and maybe
there will be a reward commensurate with the risk. So that
once you begin you wonder, you begin to wonder, if you have
anything left to lose.
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Marilyn C. Cole (email), 27, New York City, an apartment in the
Hamilton Heights end of Harlem, since August 2006. Before that,
Atlanta, Georgia for seven years, through a Georgia Tech computer
science degree and three years of learning how to be a grown-up and
still have fun. Before that, ten years in Savannah, the place that
gives her stability, that she considers to be home. Before that,
short stints in middle Georgia next to a lake; on Tybee Island next
to the beach; in a suburb of Dallas, Texas during the peak of
Dallas (the nighttime soap opera); the middle of Oklahoma for
the birth of her little brother; and Nashville, Tennessee, where she
greeted this mad messed up world.
Attending New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical
Sciences, taking coursework toward her Masters in Computer Science,
with debatable ambitions in the direction of a Ph.D. in something or
other.
Simply head over heels for a
musician whose songs makes her
woozy, whose words make her happy, who she wants to marry one day.
Strawberry-blonde hair, blue-green-yellow eyes, pale skin
with freckles.
academia,
acoustic guitar,
acting intelligent, adventures in the car,
after-rain smell, alanis morissette, angelina jolie, ani difranco,
articulateness, artificial intelligence, audrey hepburn, avocados,
bad pick up lines, beauty, being egotistical, being insecure, ben
folds, bertrand russell, bisexuality, björk, black eyeliner,
blackberries, bloody marys, books,
britney spears, bubble baths, candy, cat power, cemeteries, cheap red
wine, collar bones, conan o'brien, cooking, cool points, crisp pickle
spears, dancing, dar williams, daria, death cab for cutie,
dismemberment plan, douglas coupland,
drinking, drugs, eating outside, eeevil, elvis costello, english
accents, etiquette, falling in love,
feminism, firefly, fishnets,
flowers, freaks and geeks, frolicking, fun, getting my way, gilmore
girls, gin and tonics, girls, google, grammatical correctness, greek
mythology, hal9000, handwritten letters, happiness, harold and maude,
harry potter, harry/draco, homemade t-shirts, hot hot baths,
intelligence, jem, joel, kids in the hall, kissing, kittens,
knee-high socks, knitting, late night conversations, laughing, life,
luna lovegood, magnetic poetry, making things, margaret atwood, math,
max rebo, mazzy star, messy hair, milk, mirah, modest mouse, my
computer, my mama and
daddy
and little bro,
night swimming, nintendo, nonsense, not waiting,
nudity, new york, originality, pi, pie,
pillows, pinky and the brain, radiohead, rainer maria, reading in the
bathtub, red popsicles, richard bach, road trips,
robots, rocking
out, roller coasters, sandals, sarcasm, seduction,
sexuality, shoes,
sifl & olly, simon & garfunkel, simone de beauvoir, singing very
loudly, skirts that twirl, sleep, songs: ohia, soup, stars, staying
up too late, subversive literature, sushi, swings, sylvia plath,
tetris, thai food, the beach, the color pink,
the history channel, the month of october, the simpsons, the smell of
bookstores, the windows down, the word indeed, thrift stores,
thunderstorms, virginia woolf, weezer, wet trampolines, winks, words.
