College Life - J. R. Harrington

1. Forest

College life. Surrounded on all sides by trees, leafy greens. In the mornings it’s a comfort, in the nights the long aching branches become something other. Unwieldy forest creatures, skittish travelling through the brush. The leaves have begun to turn in earnest now, from greens to warm tones.

The leaves, too, have begun to fall, leaving their homes on the branches and dancing to the ground. They leave the branches childfree and careless, crashing together with great clamor and uproar. Some nights, a creature emerges from the darkened swell of the brush, loudly like an announcement of its coming.

You cannot see it for the shadows cast by the trees above, but you can tell it beckons—follow me. You listen for a moment before remembering old warnings in books of fairy tales. Never follow something strange into the woods. Turning, running down the hill and back to the dorms. The adrenaline takes hours to fully wear off.

College life! In the late nights you walk to a gas station restaurant with a friend. By the end of the night there are three of you, and you wander into the forest once again. This time it’s the larger forest across the street, further from safety, darker than dark. Some strange creature calls, keening, like a woman screaming but rhythmic, repeated.

You turn and the leader jumps off the path like a deer. The rest of you follow until you find the path again, and trace along it, and make it out of the darkened forest. The sound follows still, an owl or bird perhaps, but in the dark of night transformed into something monstrous.

2. Missing

Oh, you miss the forest by your dad’s house. The way the creek rose and swelled against the shore, the cliffsides overhanging beside it. You miss the everchanging greenery, the difference between each leaf. The way they sway, the way they rustle together like a group of some arcane creature.

You miss your brother. You miss him sitting down and rambling to you. You miss playing games with him, or else watching television together. How he would talk even during one of his own shows, not minding the interruption. Thinking of anything but the worst parts, all the best things about his presence.

You miss your bedroom. You left it all in disarray, and now thinking of it you wish you had tidied up before you left. You miss the corkboard full of art and little things. The walls with all their decoration, so much that it may have been excessive. The unfinished hardwood floor and unfinished walls and ceiling, the dust now settling over everything.

You miss the cats. How Mina would curl up next to you, purring in her strange way. She would make you sneeze but you never minded. Just to have something warm in your lap, smiling at you. Soft fur, claws occasionally digging into your leg. Her gently pointed ears, the fat of her stomach she loves having rubbed.

You miss your grandmother’s house. The calm of her library, relaxing and writing and taking the time to just be. The dogs rubbing against me, petting them. That poor dead dog, old

thing, passed away in his sleep. The swimming pool, and lounging in the screen house. The view down into the valley, from on high.

3. Smaller, Smaller

Classwork piles up. You have so many things to do, but still you do not rush. With intentionality, you drag yourself through. Your inner child is kicking and screaming, throwing a tantrum for every missed nap. Your inner teen is yawning in class. Every day after classes end you go back to your dorm, turn on classical, and work.

Sometimes you work on things for school, other times you work on your writing. You are comforted by the amount of time you have. Before, you were afraid there would not be enough for all of your myriad responsibilities. Now you think of the advice your professor gave on your writing, to narrow your focus in on things.

So: The ink, smearing beneath the nib of the highlighter as you swipe it across the title of each class. The way your legs have grown stronger with use, always going up and down the stairs. The strain of your muscles, the arch of your foot. The little ache in your shoulder, unexplained.

In the mornings, you pick a song for the day and pluck a tarot card to be written down in your journal. In the mornings you make tea, ginger and honey, and the water is the perfect temperature by the time it’s steeped. In the morning when the light is dim and low with the gloomy autumn day ahead of you, you stay in bed an extra hour, getting up only to reset your alarm.

Then, upon waking, you jaunt to your smoking spot and sit there among the plants by the highway. You watch cars pass and worry that one of these days a policeman will pull over and give you a fine you can’t afford. Sometimes, in the afternoons, there are ravens perched in one of the barren trees. It caws and you caw back, to the best of your ability.

Smaller, let’s go smaller. There is the whorl of a snail shell. It sits in your path, so gingerly you pick it up and move it so it won’t be crushed by your big, stomping feet. Incautious feet, always missing things from your lofty perspective. A bit bigger, now—the picture of your mother weaving daisies.

Black and white, she sits with an expression of utmost focus. Legs arrayed in the way the two of you used to sit together on her bed at grandma’s house, when you were very little and didn’t know it was hard on your knees. She wears tie-dye and ripped jeans, her hair is down and drifts about her face.

4. Poetry

You’ve grown to love the poems in which the poet tries to tell you what they’re saying. The ones where suddenly, all pretense is dropped. They’re straight to the point, they’re direct. You value that in a person, you value that in a poet. You also love the ones where the poet is vulgar, where the air gets to be a little rancid.

You do poetry workshops in creative writing. While reading on your own, you think that the poems are not very good. But in that room they become remarkable, just as amazing as the people who wrote them. They get critiqued to hell and back, and you’re jealous, sort-of but not really wishing you had signed up to have your poem examined this way.

In the next unit, or the one after, it’ll be your turn to be picked apart and put back together. One of your professors gave you three poetry books to read, and you came out of it with a few new handwritten poems in your personal connections. God, the professor. You’re growing a little too attached to her, the poise, the quiet elegance of her.

You found some of her poems online, and read them, and she’s remarkable. You want to get her poetry book as soon as possible—you think you’ll ask for it for Christmas, when your step-mother asks what you want (if she does. She isn’t really your step-mother anymore, but that didn’t stop her last year.)

Applying what you’ve learned to your own works, you think you’ve grown somewhat as a poet. You think you’ll grow even more over your two years here, and you’re excited to see the you that’ll come out of this. You want to compile all of your college-poems into a book, but first you’ll have to write them.

Sure, you write five a week for Instagram, but those are short and sweet—you want to write some that are long, and savory. A more complex flavor on the tongue. One of your professors called you “well-published” a while ago, and it has stuck with you. All your myriad pieces put out there for others to read.

5. Dreamland

You’ve been having nightmares lately. The ones where you wake up and think of them all day long, unable to get out of your head. One was a premonition of your grandmother’s dog passing away. In it, your grandmother herself had died. It was disorienting. You were lost, trying to find one thing after the other.

In the next, you were laying in bed when you psychically connected with a stranger next door. You seized up, it was terribly painful. So you went to find her, check on her and make sure nothing worse had happened to her. Another search. This one ended in a cavernous basement, where a strange man said

“I know what you are,” accusatorily. He then tried to bite your fingers off. The only other one you remember was about your mother trying to cut torn skin from your shredded knees with nail clippers. You struggled against her until you woke. Other than that, you’ve had a few lucid dreams.

Lucid dreams are interesting. They always start out as a normal dream, until the lucidity in the back of your mind makes it to the forefront and things change drastically. Once you were a cowboy, and once you drove a fast car through a city. It’s all very simple, really, the chasing after adrenaline. Something to get your blood pumping.

In your dreams, you are larger than life. You are powerful, and sometimes rude, and more yourself than upon waking. It is your subconscious stepping into the light and shining brightly, gleaming like the shell of a beetle.

6. Seasons

The clothing you wear is unwashed. You haven’t been able to figure out the issue of laundry. You have soap and dryer sheets, but they remain unopened. You don’t smell because you wear deodorant and cologne. You let each piece of worn clothing air out before you fold it and return it to the drawers.

In the evenings, you wear the same pajamas you’ve been wearing for a month. The shirt you stole from your lover and a pair of basketball shorts. Despite the itchy tag of the shirt, it’s comforting to wear something he once wore. You treasure the memory. It’s light green and sleeveless, solidly colored.

In November, your mother will visit and bring back all of the things you left at her house, including most of your clothing. You will be warm and beautiful. The frigid air will pinken your cheeks, your nose. Ice will form in the sky, turning into beautiful little flakes you’ll catch on your tongue.

The winter will be as glorious as it is cold. You’ll lament the lack of snow, surely—there was so much more when you were younger, a New York winter becomes less and less formidable as time goes on. The barren trees will take up every scene, a dusting of snow on their branches. Hopefully the path to class will not be too icy.

You’ll wear colorful hats because they’re all you have. It won’t match the rest of your outfit, but it’s that or have your ears ache with the freeze. You wait for winter like you wait for visits from friends and family—with familiarity, with affection. Now it is fall, and the chill in the air pinches your earlobes.

Soon, you won’t be able to keep your window open all the time, unless you want to freeze. The air will be still and stale. The sound will be enormous, in those still winter nights it becomes dead silent, so that any interruption is cacophonous. You look forward to the everlasting quiet of winter nights.