In the World

When I was thirteen, I came home from camp and was miserable. My mother told me I didn’t have to go there again if I didn’t want to.

How to articulate my feelings, particularly at that age, without hurting my mother’s feelings? That it wasn’t that I hadn’t had a good time at camp, but rather that I had had such a good time that returning to the world outside of camp was impossibly bleak?

It was an academic camp, where I studied writing alongside other nerds, and it was precisely the kind of complex, nuanced experience that I couldn’t get anyone in the normal world to understand. Not my friends who didn’t collect logical fallacies or write or read for fun. Not my parents who hadn’t ever gone to sleepaway camps.

I went off to college five years later, and the summer after that would work for the same camp. I recollected pieces of what had made those adolescent summers so dear to me, and I updated those parts that no longer fit, or no longer sufficed—the wonder of being away from home and picking out my own dinners at the dining hall replaced with eating fries after hour at the twenty-four-hour diner off campus; the ache of crushing on older, impossibly cooler girls, replaced with actually making out with some of the girls I thought were cool at end-of-session parties.

As I settled into adulthood, after college, after settling into full-time office work, I didn’t suppose I’d revisit this sensation of discovery again, nor the sensation of loss to follow.

Then I quit my job to move to Oregon and get my MFA.

In the day-to-day I wasn’t blissful at my MFA program. I wasn’t unhappy either, but unadulterated joy isn't sustainable day in and day out over a period of months, let alone years.

Moreover, when I finished in Oregon, I felt ready to go. Ready to pick my own books rather than submitting to reading assignments. Ready to write whatever I liked rather than responding to prompts or revising my thesis stories.

When it was all done, though, I was hesitant. I missed friends before I left them, and in fits and starts of seeing someone had a new job or had published a new story. Facebook grew populated with ghosts of connections past.

But amidst a busy summer gig, followed by a cross-country move and preparing for a wedding, it was easy to be distracted.

Then, three and a half months after graduation, I found myself killing time in a Barnes and Noble at a mall. A great big bookstore, the kind I’d loved and could have easily wiled away hours at as a teenager.

I looked for a book of essays a friend had Tweeted about a couple weeks earlier.

And I looked.

And looked.

There was no section for literary non-fiction (though Tracy Kidder and Elizabeth Gilbert found space, uncategorized, on bargain tables). In the search, I discovered there was also no section dedicated to poetry.

I wasn’t confident Maggie Nelson or Claudia Rankine--each recently declared goddamn geniuses by the MacArthur Foundation--had a single volume between them in the store.

And it occurred to me that, for most of the world’s people, most of the people to visit that store, most of the people in that mall, and in that city, this didn’t matter. Heck, it wouldn’t have mattered to my teenage self. Maybe not even me in my mid-twenties.

I felt bereft.

And this was the moment, the conglomeration of all the little things that hit me the way they do when you leave a place or poeple or a job, too, I guess. That sensation of a life past—a life that, for all its immersive qualities, I’d never get back—these casual conversations about the divide between close third and first-person narration. About lineation and liminal space. About syntax. About unearthing the heart of a story.

There was a great big world in front of me. And like it or not, I was on moving on in it.