Blog Poem: Week Three, pt. 2

A moment—unraveled—drops
on a moment already fallen
and together they rend
a hole in your heart

Blog Poem: Week Three, pt. 1

A moment—unraveled—drops
on one already fallen
and together they rend

Blog Poem: Week Two

A moment—unraveled—drops
on one already fallen

Blog Poem

So I'm gonna try this thing. If it interests you, then you should come back again next week. I'll explain it this way: I'm going to write a poem slowly, and you're going to watch. Every week I'll update the poem with a new change—a new line, an altered phrasing, etc. I'm only going to give this preface once, unless I need to repeat myself down the line. So here we go.





A moment—unraveled—drops

Off the Shelf

7:58 a.m.:

I stuffed my mouth with chocolate-fudge-sundae poptarts and shuffled along the road. It may not be a winter wonderland yet in ye olde West Michigan, but this morning was pretty foggy. Cars can sneak up on you. I was already gonna be late, and in no particular rush to abandon breakfast and personal safety for the sake of a Perfect Attendance sheet.

School’s just a five minute trot from home on days like this. Even when Lake Michigan’s heavy snows dump on us and it drops to 15º Fahrenheit I still usually walk. If I need a car to get to school, it should be a snow day. It’s still mid-October. No snow for a week yet. Hopefully.

I was still going over my mental to-do list for today: Talk to Jenn. Pass your English test. Get the girl.

8:02 a.m.:

My hands were free from poptarts by the time I made it to the side doors.

I swept by locker 657 and dropped off everything but my Precalc and English books. A handful of girls in skinny jeans and half-zipped hoodies strolled by as I stood. They were cracking drug references and stringing together (as good as) hypothetical band names—I only know either of these facts because the presence of this particular group and the scrawny alpha male they revolve around have become a memetic staple of casual school conversation. Gotta build street cred early these days.

I hurried to Precalc then without paying much attention to the other stragglers in the halls. I don’t know what possessed my school to schedule a higher level math course at 8:00 in the morning. Spite? Conditioning? Aside from engaging brain cells I didn’t realize could function at my level of consciousness that early in the morning, though, I can’t complain about the class. Yeah, it’s math. Not stupid hard, but not basic arithmetic by any means. The real perk of Precalc is its lack of posturing jerks.

And Amy’s in the class. That helps.

She’s not homecoming queen, but she’s got a nice face and doesn’t dress like a slut. Easy to get along with. I sit next to her every day in Precalc and we’re usually partners in Shop.

“Well you beat the tardy bell,” she said as I sat. About two seconds later the bell rang. We laughed. Ms. Lear sat taking silent attendance.

Amy’s eyes are brown. They have a light to them, but it’s more of a low glow than a shine. It’s comfortable. Nothing about Amy is challenging. Not like Jenn.

I spent too long looking at Amy’s eyes. Her smile went a little sheepish. Her eyes flicked towards Ms. Lear.

Amy said, “I won’t be in Shop today.”

“Yeah?” I said. Everything’s cool. The guy behind us was playing Space Invaders on his graphing calculator. A shoe-in for AP Calc.

“Orthodontist appointment,” she said, lowering her voice. Lear was standing.

I mouthed “Oh” and sat straight forward in my seat. For half a sec I was afraid I wouldn’t have a response. That would be a breach in the banter etiquette. Charm kicked in. “Finally gonna get your snaggletooth fixed?” Amy’s two front teeth have maybe a little sliver-gap between them. Okay, so “charm” in my circle sounds like irony. But Amy laughs. I think she’s cool with it.

Ms. Lear spoke up. “Good morning, class. Have a good weekend?”

I intoned a half-hearted yes along with some of the other kids.

Amy laid a pair of fingers on my arm for a second. Not the first time. Maybe not the last, either. “Braces,” Amy frowned. “I won’t be around for lunch either.”

To-do list: Talk to Jenn after passing your English test. Closure? Ask Amy out in Shop or at lunch.

Eh.

We cut off the conversation until class was over. Homework over the weekend had been kinda sparse, but most of the period this morning was lecture, and it took most of my mental energy just to take decipherable notes.

8:55 a.m.:

Ms. Lear was still discussing some of the basics of trigonometry when the bell rang. As the electronic tone clicked off, I stuffed Precalculus under my arm. “When will you be back for classes?”

Amy giggled a little at my ignorance. “Unless it’s really bad, I should be back tomorrow. I just might not eat much.”

My eyes lingered in hers a little too long again, though she didn’t really seem to notice this time. Maybe I should have asked her right there. Girls like a little boldness, right? But I needed to sort things with Jenn first. Gotta do things in order.

We floated towards the door at the back of the pack of fellow morning sufferers. “Are you leaving next period?”

“Yeah, sometime.”

We slipped into the mass of students. Two big guys jostled past me, bumping me into Amy. I didn’t complain. I felt a phantom tingle on my arm where we collided. It was. . .really nice. Yeah, that’s manly of me to admit right there, isn’t it? And so eloquent. The current was headed the wrong way and hanging around Amy would be too clingy, so I wished her good luck and broke off. She smiled and managed not to wave with a visible effort.

Being abandoned to the rush alone is an unsettling experience to begin with. Plenty of kids just can’t wait for you and shove past. Some kids do the opposite. They find a good topic of conversation and coagulate into a bubble—with an empty center—in the middle of the hall. There’s even the obligatory couple trying to grow grass on their feet. That’s when you’re going with the flow. Traveling against it is downright harrowing. There are courtesy lanes we’re supposed to follow, but courtesy just isn’t a word these guys know. They’re high-schoolers for crying out loud.

It doesn’t really matter that I’m a Junior this year. When I’m in the halls I’m just a Freshman again, lost and swept off my feet in a world that’s bigger than I am. And the only way to survive is to hold on to someone else. That’s what I did. Then we stopped having classes together.

9:00 a.m.:

Managed to reach English with my soul intact. I tread my ground carefully in that class. First of all, it’s a huge gear change. Start your day with algebra applied in ways you could never imagine! Solve puzzles! Not enough? Now dig deep into Heart of Darkness and tell me what you found! Surprise quiz. Do you remember this obscure fact from the first book we read? Oh, your book report’s due tomorrow. But Precalc is a happy place—maybe that has some tie to how I’d be sleep-walking through the class without Amy there. English is a class run by an idiot. No, I’m not talking about Mr. Cartwright.

Every day it slumps over the back of the chair, the green dye fading from the shoulders and frayed cuffs. It stinks, too, like the lines of denim soaked in the flavor of its wearer over time. One of the pockets is worn through at the bottom and a pin that says “Rock the Vote” tries to hold the torn seam together. I sit as far from it as I can. At any moment Beck could return from his smoke break or taking a dump and re-inhabit the mantle of his Beckness. The jacket could be draped over anything—a park bench, a tree branch, the edge of a dumpster—and still appear to shelter Beck’s ironic shagginess. Even without his smirks or swaggering carriage, even left alone to its own devices, the “Mad Cowbow Disease” pins adorning the sleeves and Beck’s name emblazoned on the front bear all the weight of his scorn.

Beck is the (largely) undisputed king of English class. That’s what makes him most awful. We’ve given up arguing against his interpretation of the readings. Everything has to be about sexual repression or existential symbolism. It’s not like Beck’s the best and brightest in the class. It’s just that he’s got a polished obsidian tongue. It can cut through solid steel sometimes.

English isn’t completely ruined by Beck’s presence, though. There’s Jenn. She doesn’t usually argue with Beck in class because she believes it’s too disruptive and she prefers to just move forward in the curriculum. Mr. Cartwright tries to talk about the value of dialogue when it comes to the arts, but one can only take so much Beck before giving up on civil discourse.

Thankfully.... Did I mention there was a test today? On the to-do list and everything. I hate tests on Mondays, but it means Beck can’t run the class. Cartwright just set the papers on the desk, so I didn’t have the opportunity to talk to Jenn before class. Had to try to figure out another way to start that conversation. A little distracting from the whole test thing. I think I did well, though. That’s one thing for the to-do list, maybe? I’ll find out on Friday. Jenn finished first, but Beck planted his test on the teacher’s desk a step ahead of her.

9:32 a.m.:

They left together.

I was maybe the sixth to turn in my Scan-Tron and head out. Some people have an early lunch, and for that reason English tests mean a release whenever you finish. Cartwright’s a cool guy. But that meant I was even more distracted than before Jenn and Beck walked out the door. It wasn’t like they just happened to leave at the same time. They kept walking. They started a conversation.

What.

Out in the hall, the floodwaters had stilled, with only a skipper here and there. I passed Ms. Lear as I turned down the hall with my locker. She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. Cartwright’s leniency is only popular with us students.

Quiet hallways should be a relief. Usually I’m the trickle left behind after the river drains, and the isolated sounds I make when alone calm me. This morning, though, the clangs as I opened my locker and dropped my books inside stung my ears. The line of radiator down the hall hummed into a point of resonance with the floor, bouncing into the soles of my shoes. The tremor ran up my legs and to my spine, sending a shake all the way to the base of my neck. I don’t take anything to Shop. I closed my locker and walked away, trying to keep the slightly-faster-than-the-eye flickering of the pale fluorescent lights from making my eye twitch.

9:49 a.m.:

Not sure what I decided to spend the next twenty minutes looking for. I remember urgently needing to find someone to share a hallway with. I’ve never wanted to get lost in the rush of the crowd, but Amy was already gone and Jenn was walking with Beck.

I spotted them again near the cafeteria. They must have walked the halls a few times, because Beck has that early lunch and they were just now getting in line. There’s always a line. Jenn stood with Beck in line despite having lunch the same time I do; stood close enough that their shoulders brushed occasionally. They were talking about something—or Beck was talking while Jenn looked up at him and listened. I couldn’t see her face because she was turned towards him, but I imagined fawning eyes. They didn’t match the set of faces I have in mind when I think of Jenn. She doesn’t fawn. But I couldn’t get it out of my head. I leaned against the wall and stared into space as if I was thinking about something else. Anything else.

I glanced at them every few moments, when I felt comfortable Beck wasn’t going to look up from Jenn’s face and catch me standing over a pile of eaves. Not that I could hear a thing he said. Whatever it was, he wanted to get it all out before he could be interrupted. His brows were furrowed a lot like they do when he stares down at you and laughs inside while he insults your level of consciousness. I stayed because I was afraid that Jenn would skip her third class and eat lunch with him. To-do list: Pass the English test. Talk to Jenn. Then....

Jenn and I used to have pretty much all of our classes together. We’d talk about stuff. We’d sit together at lunch and keep talking. Didn’t care if our friends joined us or not. I had friends then, too. If I ever spotted them I’d try to say hey, but Junior year’s really rough for most people academically. They get a little distracted. It’s like a preview of life after graduation. You get to find out who actually cares about you.

I couldn’t stand to wait another day to talk to Jenn.

The warning bell sounded. Beck turned away from Jenn and cut a Freshman. Jenn whirled on me and glared for a long moment as soon as Beck wasn’t looking. Women are the most terrifying creatures on the planet. I started to approach her so I could explain myself, but she waved me away and hurried off. I might have followed her, but I’d already been nearly late for one class today and I wanted to get Shop over with.

10:00 a.m.:

Shop class is in a big room with saws and drills and sandpaper coming out of the woodwork—literally. The class is full of people who don’t want to be there. A few of them like crafty sorts of things, but they’d rather be doing them in their own back yard. Most of them are the jerks I mentioned earlier. The posturing ones. They monopolize the machines when Doc isn’t looking. We’re told we don’t actually need partners, but solidarity is the only way Amy and I can get a hold of the bandsaw when we need it. Consequently, Shop sucked today. I’m supposed to be making a distinctively shaped and well polished piece of wood. A fish seemed easy enough. But I haven’t finished cutting out the shape.

It’s not like I’m shy. I spoke up, demanded a shot at the saw. They told me to wait my turn. Three times for the first twenty minutes. I ended up sanding down one of my previous projects and trying to imagine things Amy and I might have been talking about if she didn’t get braces today. I thought about Jenn, too. Glare or no glare....

10:55 a.m.:

The student river was back. It carried me to the cafeteria. We shuffled into a line. The lines are a dam. A trickle flows through the bottom, but huge pressure builds up around those release points. I can feel it press in on my head, the thrum of voices drowning each other out. Mondays are chicken nugget day. They aren’t bad, but when I’m standing in that dammed buzzing line all I want is a tray full of nuggets. Not that they make the buzzing voices stop.

A bell of a voice cut through the din. “Hey.”

I turned too quickly and clipped Jenn a bit with my shoulder. With her, there’s no phantom tingle. Not anymore. “Hi Jenn,” I said. “Sorry.” The buzzing around us made it too difficult to talk. I’m not really sure she heard me anyway. The crowd rolled us forward. She would sometimes steady herself on my shoulder. We pretend it’s necessary and never talk about it.

I got my tray and Jenn got hers. Once we broke out of the line we were flung into the roaring sea. The voices continue, but the pressure recedes. Thankfully Jenn followed me when I made my way to a somewhat quiet corner of the cafeteria. She sat down first.

“Did you pass the test?” Jenn asked. She remembers my to-do lists.

I told her I thought so. She tried to start discussing the questions, but I cut her off. “I don’t want to talk about the test. I want. . . .” I paused. Jenn has blue eyes. The ubiquitous kind. Bright and challenging. The kind you’re supposed to get lost in. But they weren’t even aimed at me. She dipped a chicken nugget in ketchup and bit into it. “I want to talk about school.”

“Why the sudden need for conversation?” she asked after swallowing the bite of nugget. “We haven’t talked about anything but ‘school’ for weeks.” If we talk at all.

“I needed some clarification,” I said. Jenn arched an eyebrow. “About. . . things.”

“Are you talking about Beck?” Someone at the table a few yards away glanced over at Jenn’s outburst. When no food flew he went back to his nuggets.

“And Amy,” I mumbled.

“Who?”

“I just need to sort things out, and I thought—”

“So you think we need each other’s permission?”

“We were almost dating,” I said, mimicking her emphasis.

Her eyes went wide and her nostrils flared. She brushed away a lock of hair, staring down forty-five degress at the middle of the table. “That term and its connotations aren’t accurate or useful. We never dedicated special time to indulge our mutal curiosities. You never found it necessary to broach the subject with me.” After a moment, she quoted me, eyebrow still raised, “‘Almost.’”

I wanted to tell her to talk like a normal person, but she cherished nuance and expected me to be understanding. “I didn’t know if. . . . Look, I thought I knew you, and now you’re walking around on his arm—”

“Hyperbole isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

“I just don’t get it.”

“Beck is complicated.”

Complicated? “I didn’t expect that from you.” Tim, a friend from Freshman year, started to approach our table, but he caught my glance and turned away. I started caring who hears what Jenn and I talk about when she stopped eating lunch with me every day.

“What?”

“The excuse.”

“I fear you mistake my intentions, Trace.”

Hearing her say my name was an electricity I thought I had gotten over. I stumbled to make a response before closing my mouth and looking her directly in the eye. We used to have staring contests. Another thing we rationalized away and never talked about.

“If so, it’s mutual,” I said, finally. “I wanna go out with Amy.” It wasn’t a lie, per se. But as long as we weren’t still talking about Beck.

“‘Go out with.’” Jenn repeated.

“I wanna have some fun. Get in another mess.”

“You call our friendship a mess?” Jenn leaned back, arms folded. She had forgotten her meal. So had I, I guessed. But my nuggets were half gone. Just kidding.

“Well it certainly isn’t tidy.”

“If I was interested in Beck, how would you react?”

“Probably a lot like this.”

Jenn paused and took a thoughtful drink of chocolate milk. “Do you ever get lonely, Trace?”

Flickering lights. Slamming locker. A shiver. “So you go for the Army Jacket?”

Jenn sighed. “Have you ever had a conversation with Beck? A real one? Or are you content only to know him as the douchebag in English class?”

I sat blinking at her choice of words. Jenn wasn’t a vulgar person. No, this reflected on me. The shock of that left quickly, though, replaced by heat beneath the collar of my t-shirt. This conversation wasn’t supposed to be about him. Maybe I should count myself lucky she even decided to talk to me. She was already shifting, looking about ready to stand up. I tried to play along. Keep her— “So what’s his deal?”

Jenn shook her head. “I’ve taken the time to listen to him. Maybe it’s doing him some good. It might do you some good too.”

I ate the rest of my lunch alone. No closure.

12:00 p.m.:

P.E. after lunch. Ran too hard. Threw up in the bathroom. Sat on the counter until the bell rang.

1:00 p.m.:

There’s no Jenn or Amy in Physics. There’s just Beck, and he’s always too tired or too high to do much in the class but work. I stood in the doorway for a bit, trying to guess where Beck would lay his jacket, until Mrs. Goethe asked me to move. A handful of other students were in class already, like the graphing calculator guy from Precalc. I picked a desk and dumped myself into it. Outside, the hallway buzzed.

Beck sat next to me. When Mrs. Goethe assigned in-class problems after her thirteenth explanation of vectors for the year, he scooched closer and started scribbling his answers in horrible handwriting. “You don’t look so hot, man.”

I quietly pointed out that his eyes were bloodshot.

“Shut up. I’m trying to be nice for our mutual friend.”

I don’t know why, but I bit my tongue. Not sure why I didn’t chew him out.

“She was crying in World History today,” Beck said. “Dried it up before the teacher could notice, yeah, but still. You guys are friends, right?”

“Why wouldn’t we be?”

“How should I know? I’m asking you.” He was, high—or only barely off of one—and trying to make this conversation, and he was already on his third problem. I think conversation is what makes him tick.

“It isn’t your business, Beck.” Hannah shushed me from a row back. She had a crush on me once upon a time.

“You should probably start solving problems,” Beck said. He was quiet for a minute, gnawing the eraser off his pencil. I fumbled out a sheet of paper and started taking down the numbers from the overhead. “She told me to give you a shot,” he said.

I was still a furnace from lunch. I didn’t really register what he said until about a minute later, and by then I decided I was done listening. My throat still burned from P.E. Still burns. The problems looked an awful lot like my Precalc homework.

Beck jotted his name on the top right hand corner of his paper. “You’re a pisshead, Trace.” I thought he’d said it with a smirk, but he was grimacing. I just registered the tremor in his voice.

2:05 p.m.:

Tardy bell. Still staring at my locker.

2:12 p.m.:

Narrowly avoided an unexcused absence in Spanish. Not paying attention. I used to have real conversations. Now I flirt with a girl in English class and wish her eyes were blue. Pienso que es Jenn la quiero.

3:03 p.m.:

“Jenn!”

“Hi....”

“Can we have lunch again tomorrow?”

Jenn leans on the clunker her dad lets her drive to school. She doesn’t say anything.

“I mean with Tim and Hannah and them,” I say. “It’s been forever.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, it has.”

Jeff Blogs-Introduction

The world is a wild and terrible wasteland of misery and cruelty. It’s a cold, hard, loveless machine trudging towards “progress” without regard for the little gears grinding to bits at its heart.

There are two ways to deal with this truth. One is to grind your way to the surface, and supervise the poor saps unfortunate enough not to make it. Another is to find a couple gears you don’t mind grinding beside and spend your life with them.

I have no heart for the first option. It takes a gall I can’t imagine to live on another’s suffering. My choice is to find a little ring of friends to join and breathe easy for a little while before it’s over.

I’ve just had a really hard time finding that ring of friends.

A week ago I walked into a coffee shop. You have no idea how unusual that is for me. First of all, I live in a small town in midwest Michigan. There aren’t any coffee shops in walking distance, and I’m not wasting gas money to go waste more money on drinks I don’t like and can’t afford in a place whose atmosphere makes my head spin. Suffice it to say I’m not a coffee shop kinda guy.

To save you the asking, I was there because my boss wanted a coffee that bad. I’ll go buy my boss a coffee if I’m getting paid for it. So yeah, that’s why. My plan was to walk in, read the sticky note on the back of my hand to the—what is it, barista or something?—pay, and get out before I was bleeding The Dashboard Confessional out of my ears.

“Hi,” is what she said. The... barista... lady. Just after walking in I tripped over a patron’s Macbook cord and had to catch myself on the counter. In the process of stumbling my way in front of the register, I must have brushed the back of my hand across something, because when I arrived the sticky note had disappeared. So I must have looked like I was drunk or drugged or both by my deer in the headlights expression and staggered stance. And she said “hi” with all the judgment of one of those blood pressure machines.

Her name was Fen. Or at least that’s what was on her nametag thing. God knows how people love to put weird things on their name tags.

In response to my blank stare, Fen drummed her fingers in triplets. She didn’t seemed bothered at all. If I had my guess, she would just have preferred to have a glass in her hands. “Hi,” she said again.

I droned out an ummmmm and finally mimicked her “hi.” She gave the slightest of smirks.

I looked down quickly at the back of my hand. I thought my boss just wanted black coffee with two creams. That was all. Right?

Fen’s eyes flickered towards the door. She drummed out a triplet again. Hummed out a line of Vindicated. Stepped to the side, snatched something, and stepped back. I was just starting to look up when she slapped my sticky note back onto my hand.

“Mocha twist’ll be right out,” she said. “Does your boss know we deliver?”

I forced a chuckle. “She might.”

Fen smiled. “Just gimme an address and she doesn’t have to know.”

Basically, that’s Fen for you. She gets out of her job for twenty minutes to deliver a dozen coffees to my work, and spends about five of that talking to me about whatever. And I guess that’s what I’m writing this blog about. This weird girl I met in a coffee shop once.

I’ll keep you posted.