It’s hard to meet someone serious at college. Everyone’s busy,
self-centeredly grinding away at their dreams. So much so that
people tell you to not even try (especially as a freshman).

I was mostly at ease with myself—as a freshman. I had an
excellent skincare routine—it was downright luxuriant, and it
kept me going, through that romantically baren and lonely year.

But we humans hope—we buy lotto tickets to dream on—though we know the awful math. We Gen Z’s seem to have our own unique brand of loneliness, born of covid and Internet-age experience.

My romantic expectations, sophomore year, were low—ok, unmeasurable.

Looking around was depressing. There were socially awkward STEM majors, jocks, frat men (sure the world’s laid-out just for them) and ‘CSOM Bros" (business majors more interested in parlaying my Grandmère’s money than me) and the elusive, emotionally reserved, ‘regular guys.’

But the unexpected can happen. We all know how crowded campus coffee shops are—the students move in and out in tides as noisy as the real, salty ocean. And then there you were, a rumpled, 25-year-old doctoral student—from another world—asking to share my table.

The loudest thing in that room was your sense of stillness. You seemed to be a new and distinct species, and as we talked, you seemed to somehow smooth my anxious edges. After a few meets, the thought, ‘I really like this guy,’ seemed to have its own gravity.

We somehow managed to thread the ‘too busy to care’ dynamic, and as time went by, you helped me channel my absurd, fiery, pastel-painted, first-love, early-twenty girlhood heat into something longer lasting, deep and authentic. Congratulations! It’s been two years.

Separating now, would be like removing the salt from the sea.
.
.
Songs for this:
Playing House by Kudu
So Much Mine by The Story
After Last Night by The Revlons

Such power runs thru
cascading technology,

So driven is the word
spread thru comms networks
and uttered by multifarious devices;

Soon consumed
by feedback and
amplified until it

subsides for lack of dopamine, and then:
Soothed by new content a cascade begins again.
Socials can feel like a perpetual, unstructured interview
but think what a novel form of interrogation it is
and what a humane place this is become;

Yet some still hold to their crypt
over this brave new world
and the people in it.

Yesterday's analog echoes,
Today's digital samples,
Tomorrow's quantum timbre

will change how we hear ourselves
or determine our fantasies.

Thus passes a lifetime.

She had that
octopus smile,
always reaching for
something.
I was her small
fish; her handmaid.
I lived in her nebulous
world for far too long.
Inky confusion...

There's a reason for
your treason, said the
old man to the shark,
but Hem forgot, a beast
is a beast, they do
beastly things.
We all have to eat.

I'm done being the
meal.
It's your Ocean,
I'm just trying to
swim in it.

You're an oyster,
and I want your
pearl,
but I won't drown
for it.

In the chill of the mist
we walk on the almost deserted way.

I have little to say
being filled with her beside me
and she breathes the wind in
as our lonely world spins.

Sometimes we touch as we walk
prompting her to look at me
with a veiled smile across her face
when the walk seems sweeter than happiness.

The date trees are brimming with juice, she says
the pots will be filled in no time, I affirm,
some farther and we will be there.

Something akin to love
brews with the nectar.