Welcome to the third year of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at PLU in Tacoma. Here we are, all together again. There is such a euphoria to seeing all these people again, many of them people we haven't seen in a year, although a lot of sharing goes on via Facebook.
My flight was a red-eye, so between that and my meds I was falling off my chair for the opening night readings, which killed me as both faculty readers are wonderful writers as well as great readers of their work.
Staying in the dorm rooms, and this time we're back in the dorm of our first year, which is conveniently located half way between the places we mostly frequent. Last year it was being renovated--seems like there's always some renovation going on here--and we were in a dorm so far away from everything that you either had to sprint a lot or pack everything for the whole day.
I don't know how the students manage two to one of these rooms all year. I'm using the second bed for my wardrobe, shown above. That random scatter of clothes is quite evocative of how I'm feeling. Put together but in bits. Put together on top of something shattered. A lot of the time I'm managing to be my old excited insightful self of these residencies. But then I have to go hide for a while.
Friends, I am fragile. And buoyed and sustained by my wonderful friends in Anchorage with whom I stayed for the days before I left. They reminded me of life and life's affirmations. They shared with me the makings of good salads and the rightness of food in the belly. They took care of me.
I am fragile. The definition--true definition--of lost is as the opposite of find--. of findable, even. If you know where you last saw something, even if you never find it, it's not truly lost. Well, during the days in Anchorage, moving back and forth between people's houses, I lost my phone.My iPhone, with everything on it. At first I was in disbelief. The old Ela never lost things, let alone something as important as an iPhone. But there it was, or rather, there it wasn't. No denying that, and I lacked the very faintest notion of how I might have lost it. I remembered pulling it out to share pictures. I don't remember putting it back in its very own pocket of my vest, but the latter is such a reflex action (to avoid losing it) that I could have done so on autopilot. And it's not at that house. We looked intensely. Not a clue. But there it was--no phone, on the verge of a trip. A new iPhone was out of the question by over $600. So I'm now learning my way around an Android. I'm not especially techie and I don't want to talk about that on here because I think many of my readers also are not techie. Just that's the story. Later the same day, I became convinced I'd lost my car keys. I turned my purse inside out several times, we scoured the very short distance between my having them and not; finally Phil, who was there, scoured my purse again and there they were in the back pocket (which I hadn't checked) where I'd put them for safekeeping.
It feels a lot like how I've heard the aging process (in people's 60s/70s/80s) described...it is the aging process, just thirty years too early. I cannot trust myself. When I'm out of comfort zone, living out of car and visiting with friends for a couple nights, moving from one thing to another, I can't trust myself with the most basic of things. And I panic. I didn't with the phone, it was just too bizarre. Panic I did with the keys, though. And there's always more travel in my future. I seem to live from trip to trip.
Sorry if this sounds like a bit of a "dear diary" blog post. I just wanted to be real about fragility and how it comes to us or presents itself within us when we're not expecting it.
