Untitled+Memoir

Hello! Here is an excerpt from my memoir. It's not the whole thing, so if it feels unfinished, that's why. Title suggestions and critical feed back are welcomed.

I can tell it three ways. I can tell you that there are no theatrics, that no glamour runs through the free nightly opera of summer. Also that there’s still mud on the soles of my shoes. Also that it was divine, illusory, that the stars were prophetic. And after that I can tell you to immerse yourself in something real. Let’s sit on the grass, I said. She said, Let’s sit on the grass and smoke. We don’t smoke, I said. Let’s sit on the grass and pretend we are the kind of people who sit on the grass and smoke.

The lawn at the university is wide and green. The day smells like mulch and the night smells like night. If you sit on the grass with your notebook or your PC or your six-string, someone might find you, and if nobody finds you you might find yourself—in the dirt or in the air, whichever you can afford. I couldn’t find anything half the time—my socks, my room key, my money—because I was curled up on the couch of the first floor commons, fast asleep and waiting to be found. We thought of ourselves as a writers’ colony. Walked together, ate together, practically breathed together. After dinner, Noa and I would run out onto the lawn, and she would gather the girls in her suite and I would gather the girls in mine and some of the boys from down the hall, and we would sit with the bugs in the damp evening air and talk. The first night, Noa had to go through the ritual of explaining her name. So you’re Noa. I’m Noa. And you don’t have an ark. And I don’t have an ark. And you’re not named after anybody who had an ark. And I’m not named after anybody who had an ark. So what’s with your name. Noa is the name of one of the first feminists in the Bible. There were three sisters who went to Moses to ask if they could collect their inheritance from a deceased— Okay, okay, I see. So that’s where it’s from. That’s nice, I guess. We were this way for three weeks, collecting our inheritance. We scraped it out from underneath the brick walkways. We put it to rhythm. We slapped it on blank pages and hurled it back at each other with microphones every weekend, huddled together in the communal assembly, on the floor of the window-lit Barrel. The banana plant was nothing more than meditation. It’ll be difficult, Noa said. I know. We’d have to do it after dinner. That way once they figure it out, we have until morning. Should we plan it? I said.

The banana plant at O’Hill dining hall rests at the foot of the stairs, in a red plastic pot that mimics a terra-cotta. You might just be heading up those steps, or swiping your debit card, or peeking over the balcony when you’ve finished your breakfast, but when you catch a glimpse of the flat green leaves fanning out from the trunk, something in you gets to fidgeting. So you table it, you keep it to yourself for as long as you can—because you have no rationale, just this visceral, burning little devil. But sooner or later, it happens. We ate. Our eyes inspected each other, nerves shot through our fingertips. It was revenge against the greasy eggs and overcooked stew meat, but it was also more, and we saw this as we looked at each other across the table, we saw the gold sitting before us. There had been planning, days of contemplation funneled down into one moment. Our inheritance, ready for collection. One by one, we left the table and returned our trays to the rotating rack adjacent the stairs. Then, in affected syncopation, we walked down.

Noa later said of it that it was her dirt or air. The leaves, she said, she was all there in the leaves and the potted soil. She wanted to speak spiritually to us. I can feel it. I really think I can feel it now. Feel what? The muse. The bananical aura of God. The plant had been smuggled into the Barrel under four-person security and now rested in a corner where no one in particular would care to look at it. Look at it, Noa said. Why? I said. Those are your riches. That’s something vital, staring you in the face. You’re gonna be crammed into a stuffy, one-room apartment someday, with nothing but a cheap typewriter and piles of rejection notices, and you’ll be wishing you held onto that plant. No money for you, I’m sure, but if you’re poor //everywhere//—well, you can’t be. It’s that simple. You can’t be poor everywhere or you’ll die. That’s a bleak analysis, I said. Don’t you think some of us— No. There is no some of us. There is all of us and none of us. Go drown yourself in the melodrama of it, but that’s how it will be.