I FEED MYSELF.

I had lunch with a few friends from high school today, some of whom I haven’t seen in years - some not since we graduated, all the way back in 2010. We caught up mostly in the ways girl who haven’t seen each other in a while do, and talked through boyfriends and fake IDs and school, all safe and noncontroversial. One of my friends asked what I was majoring in and, when I responded history and Chinese, the Chinese part always some kind of talisman against Asian-mom-disappointment, expressed surprise.

“I thought you were going to be a writer,” she said, careless, and I laughed it off, saying that it had just been a high school pipe dream, that I wanted different things now, that, actually, I didn’t even write much anymore.

But sometimes I look back at my poetry, like I did today - not all of it is good, obviously (in fact, most of it is not very good) - and I miss it a lot. I wrote this three years ago when I was 17, the winter of my last year of high school. In a lot of ways, that was one of the worst school years of my life, not necessarily grades-wise but personal issues-wise. The following school year, my first in college, was wonderful if only in comparison. I haven’t written much since, and I always joke about Iowa making me soft and complacent, but I wonder if it isn’t at least a little bit true. I was angrier, more annoying, and way more thoughtless at 17, but at least I did something productive with it. I was more idealistic, and lazier, too - I did want to be a writer, but never enough to subject my poetry to real criticism. I always wanted to perform my poetry, but never enough to stick it out through a workshop after the first day. To be fair, I still don’t.

I’m not sure what I want to say - I’m a little more introspective now that I’m older, and I also take myself more seriously (gag/lol). I write more of these weird pseudo journal entries for the internet which, in the long run, is probably better than writing pretentious poetry for the internet though that has also had the unfortunate side effect of me no longer writing pretentious poetry even for myself.

BACK IN THE 917

AYO NEW YORK WHAT UP WHAT UP GET AT ME

asian supermarkets for dayzzzzzzzzzzzz

(San Sebastian, Spain, July 2010. R.)
 

I am fourteen the first time he turns me down, but I don’t think anything of it then. It is, after all, to be expected—I am thrilled he writes back at all. In a move that will define our entire relationship, I try to sound older and more clever than I am in my response. In my fourteen-year-old arrogance, I am completely convinced I have succeeded. He doesn’t write back, and if everything had ended there, I would’ve been satisfied. That first email was all I’d wanted, after all.

And so, I maintain that it is his fault anything came of it at all. Much later, he is the one to contact me asking if I was the one who’d emailed him so many months ago and, if so, he has something to show me. I would’ve said yes even if it hadn’t been. I was young but even then I knew one—especially if one is fourteen and terrified of her own reflection—doesn’t pass up chances like that. I don’t understand the humor in the email he forwards me but God knows that I tried.

In retrospect, how I admire my fourteen year old self—awkward, insecure, and uncomfortable still with being a teenager, where had I found the courage to be so frank?

I think about him most often late at night, when he was always, as he probably is now, in a foreign city I have only ever heard of and will be lucky to visit in my lifetime. I like to think that he would think of me sometimes, and maybe even more than sometimes, if the thirty-odd postcards, circa late 2008 to early 2011, are any indication at all.

I remember the first one best of all, because he’d sent it from a country I couldn’t even pronounce, but mostly because I was fifteen and giddy and it was the first time a stranger had known so much about me. I carried it around between the pages of some inconsequential textbook for weeks afterwards; I am sorry now to everyone who had to hear about it then. I am sorry still for the years after. I was insufferable, I am sure.

Sometimes I imagine that things would’ve been different had the one he sent for my eighteenth birthday, the last one, reached me, instead of being lost forever on a mailroom floor in a small Midwestern town six days before Christmas. Even now, I blame that post office more than I should.

New York, I know, had been a disappointment. He’d liked me better, I’m sure, when I was from Arizona, pining after a boy with yellow hair, brown eyes, a lucky left foot, and a good taste in poetry. I have never been to Arizona, but I imagine those are common there too.

Was I easier to swallow when I was two time zones away, as opposed to a few neighborhoods over? I wish I’d known better. Then I might’ve lied about that, too.

I am eighteen when I finally meet him. The first time he calls me gorgeous that day is after he’s walked me to the subway station after a dinner where he proves himself the kind of man who would take a second generation Chinese American girl to a dumpling place run by a young white man who shouts in heavily accented Mandarin Chinese at a cook who could easily be my mother. The second time is by email, after which he has never spoken to me again.

Mid-August, 2011. He calls me gorgeous twice, and that in itself should’ve been a tip-off—never trust a poet who paraphrases himself.

and misreads the pinyin for 苦 (‘bitter’, ku, third tone), thinking it means ‘cool’ (酷 ku, fourth tone), and completely misses the point of the entire passage

Intern Clare Sells Out and Buys a Business Card Holder.

I’m at an age where I need to print business cards

how even should they look

what address do I even put on them - my summer one?? my home?? my school?

should I just make general cards or internship-specific ones

why is adulthood so hard u____u

Intern Clare somehow tricks innocent government employee into employing her for a summer; plots eating tour of Washington D.C. and work wardrobe, ignores making friends with other interns.

(Wait really though - what do I wear to work????? HELP)