8 minute Interlude

This is a mid-morning song to the evening sun. When I see you, I will have something to show you - the basket of finished work from the day. It might have some threads that need tightened, but it's form will be profound. Solid. Complete.

I have been weaving it on this loom for the last six months, and as it stood, inert, ungrowing, I criticized it. Decided it wasn't smart enough. "I can only bee what I am," it said, "I am not big enough to cover over the entire upstairs rooms of your brain. I am made to make you warm in winter, spring and fall, and to make a foot-bridge to the next right thing on your path. Let me be what I am." "But I need you to be magical, and to fly me to the places I think about," I said, "I want you to be a gothic cathedral to my intellect, and to make the children weep because of your beauty and sadness. I sprinkled little sparks of my own life into the threads of your pattern, and so you must be perfect."

"This will never get done if I have to be perfect," the unfinished drapery retorted from it's rack. "I am function. I am meant to be useful, and not an embodiment of your identity. Finish this. Move on." And so, because the design was unarticulated, but all the threads were there, I have been weaving night and day. Sometimes it tells me to use the green thread. Sometimes there's a snarl in the industrial spools, and needs snipped off and re-attached. It has taken on the shape and size that will make it into what it needs to be.

Dear Thesis,

An Open Letter to my Thesis (from the person who intends to murder you, drag you home, frame you, and hang you on the wall):

Dear Thesis,

You have been my partner in a slowly unfolding, and now threadbare relationship. The butterflies are gone. You have become the thing I have to get over before I can get on with my life. While I love the things I learned from the hours we spent together, I’m ready to sign the papers.

I have historically fallen in love with mysterious and quiet ones. You, however, have been both silent and punishing. I have to watch what I say about you, and even if I’m talking about you to someone about how we’re doing, I’m afraid you’re going to walk up and correct me – expose me and my hedging half-truths, since I’m usually casting a sunnier light on our true state of union than exists on paper. People ask about you at church, at work, at the coffee-shop; they encourage me to keep going – remind me that these relationships are difficult.

I don’t always tell them about how, in one day, you went from 42 pages to 15, and most of that re-written the day that I was finally able to force you to show up. Or that I’ve gained and lost the same 10 pounds three times from the comfort eating – since complex carbohydrates bring me more emotional solace than any of your page-long insights into narrative structure or archetypal meaning. 

I thought I loved you. I thought that your topic would bring me hours of unflinching closeness to the ineffable beauty of the world, to the piercing brightness of truth, and that like a close kind friend you wouldn’t let me down – but that my love for you would spur me on to greatness and the great American novel.

Maybe it was the cheating I did that did us in – all those hulu videos I’d watch when I couldn’t think of what to say to you, or the online window-shopping when the monthly stipend was clearly not going to cover ANYTHING either vintage or ebay.

Though it was only window-shopping, those manitobah mukluks did drag little pieces of my heart away to their digital lairs. It also could have been the facebook stalking of myriad ex-boyfriends. I was bored with you like I had grown bored of them (and they of me) – compounding my regret that I didn’t just take the damn comps and get it over with.

So here we are. This is an impasse. An arm-wrestling death-match. One of us will make it out of this alive, and rest assured that it won’t be you.  I have a bowie knife, a passport and a fast car, and all you have are words lined up in the passive voice to avoid what has become an inevitable confrontation. Now I’ll read your leather-bound obituary from within the safe walls of a Canadian MFA program. Because I have loved you, I hope that your death is relatively painless.

Love,

Student