10:13 am. A text from you: what time are we leaving for Cornell? I’m embarrassed by your apparent lack of enthusiasm so I overcompensate with emojis, enough for you and I both. Three hours later I pick you up from your driveway, turn my music down, and hope to God you don’t hear which boyband I had been listening to. You get in and immediately fill up the entire passenger seat. You grow and grow and fold your right leg over your left until it’s encroaching upon my personal space and you turn the music up a little and then reach to roll down the window (to grow some more, I guess) and I have to tell you that my window won’t roll back up if rolled down and you acknowledge this but grow even more anyway, regardless of the fact that there’s nowhere else for you to go.
We’re awkward for a few minutes. This was to be expected considering our first few interactions had been drunken arm touches and Snapchats asking where are you? on nights we wanted to find each other even though we had no right to know where the other was. Then you break the silence, and we talk about where we’re from and where we want to go, and suddenly it’s not so awkward anymore. This is a conversation I feel like I’ve had before. I can envision conversations with you for miles to come. This is a conversation that makes a forty-five-minute car ride feel like five.
When we finally make it to Cornell, it’s 2:17pm and we decide to walk around a bit, together, to help you get your bearings. You can hardly contain your excitement when you see the baseball field – it’s endearing. We split up once we’ve finished our tour of Lincoln Hall, which is, appropriately, the music building. I leave you and walk around campus before finally settling in Goldwin Smith to journal for the fifty minutes before it’s time to meet back up. I’ve lied to you – you don’t know that the only reason I’m in Ithaca with you is to be with you, but I think it’s better that you don’t know.
2:46pm. I’m having fun with Peter. He’s cool. My journal tells a story I’d never be able to say to your face – I enjoy the time I’ve spent with you, though it’s limited and I know I’ll never have time like this with you again. This connection that I seem to have made has pushed my anxiety down into a part of me that it hasn’t seen it a while. Being here for today has been good for my soul … I feel good right now. These are words my journal hasn’t heard from me since at least April. Today has been a lot less awkward than I thought it would be I thought it would be a lot harder to just hang out, one on one, yet here we are. It’s really hard to be uncomfortable/an anxious mess around him.
I think about the stop sign that I almost ran in front of the admissions building, on our way to park at the Schoellkopf garage. I think about seeing my ex-boyfriend in front of the philosophy building. I think about the dance class I interrupted when I was trying to write poetry in the science building.
You text me and we meet in front of the statue of Ezra Cornell. I hardly recognize you, in your flannel, your legs crossed, on a bench, and I realize that I’ve never seen you sitting down. You make a phone call and I pretend not to eavesdrop but I can’t help it. I’m admiring the professional tone you adopt, watching people go by, wondering if they think we’re a couple, but we’re not sitting close enough for anyone to think that.
3:47 pm. We walk from the Arts Quad to Collegetown Bagels and I think that maybe you’ll offer to pay for my meal – I don’t know why I think this – but you don’t. You follow my lead, walking up to the counter to order your bagel. You decide to try the Big Sur because that’s what I tell you is my favorite on the menu, and I feel a warmth radiate outward from the center of my body until I’m sure I must be leaking happiness from my fingertips. I know then that this day won’t have been a waste of time in any way.
You ask questions and I respond, my mouth full of apples and honey and cheese, and I’m grateful that you don’t think any less of me for talking with my mouth full. I ask questions and you respond, bashfully, blissfully unaware of how intrigued I am by your every answer. I drink my Hubert’s Lemonade – mango flavored – and you drink yours, a brand called Nantucket’s Nature. The cap has a fact about whales on it, something about how hundreds of them live in the waters surrounding Nantucket, and you get excited, cleaning it off, gushing about how you’d like to give this to a certain Moby ****-obsessed professor.
4:31pm. The Ithaca Commons during Apple Fest is more hectic than I’m used to, but we make it all the way down to Taste of Thai and then back to the playground before deciding on a destination. As we meander you ask me if I’ve ever dated a boy shorter than me. I blush knowing my negating answer will make me seem vain. I catch your grin with my own and we walk into Autumn Leaves, a used bookstore.
We talk about The Hobbit and David Sedaris and my favorite poets and poems and I buy Dracula, because it’s four dollars and because I’m so intoxicated with adrenaline that I can’t not. I learn that your favorite movie is Fever Pitch because, honestly, why wouldn’t it be. We leave the bookstore, my backpack a little heavier and my heart a little lighter. We should be holding hands, I think, and immediately I’m terrified you can read my mind but I know there’s no way that’s possible.
As it’s Apple Fest, you claim it’s only appropriate that we eat an apple each, even though I’m pretty sure I’m allergic and I’ve had more than enough apples already that day. You offer up two dollars in quarters to the man behind the stand and ask what he’d recommend. He turns our attention to the resident apple expert, who asks what our favorite apples are, and you tell her that mine is Fuji. I don’t remember telling you this about myself. We are told to try an apple called ***’s Orange Pippin, and we’re intrigued until we find the basket – it’s full of ugly apples. The apples we do eat are too sweet, too big, and we can’t finish them. We laugh together – what if those apples, the ugly ones, the ones too ugly for us to eat, were the best apples of the bunch? We tell each other that we’re *******. We’re *******. We just stereotyped those apples! How could we do that?
We duet “Africa” by Toto as we leave Ithaca, the sun warming my face, your laugh filling the car. On the ride home we talk, more than we did on the drive down to Ithaca. You ask if I’ve watched Doctor Who and I smile because there’s no way you can’t read my mind, at this point. I tell you about the T.A.R.D.I.S. shirt I saw on the Commons and how I almost asked, but I didn’t, in your words, want to sound like a ******* nerd. We talk music and I find out you’re a Beatles fan who’s never seen Across the Universe so I ask you to play “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” and as we sing along it dawns on me how this would seem if we were in a romantic comedy. I’ve just seen a face. I can’t forget the time or place where we’ve just met.
7:41pm. It wasn’t a date. It wasn’t a date. It wasn’t a date, I tell myself as we pull back onto school property. You’ll be getting out of my car soon, my car you just helped me name, and you’ll be heading back to your apartment to catch up on Saturday night drinking, and I’ll be scaling the hill to the athletic center to watch my friends kick each other’s ***** in a game of unprofessional basketball. We’ll go back to our lives that probably will never intertwine again – and maybe they weren’t meant to in the first place. As I walk back to my room, I’m hit by how exhausted I am. I’m hit by how hard I must have been working without even realizing to seem like a normal human being, one whose brain isn’t constantly trying to keep them from going outside. I’m a firm believer in having to work for what you want, and I worked for you, but maybe I didn’t work hard enough. Or maybe I’m working for the wrong person.

I am shades of midnight, shards of the same galaxy collapsed and contrasted to tiny little ***** that grow like eggs not subsumed by Mars quakes.
I am faulty genes, x-rays, heart scans, and red cells insufficient.
I am sexuality in a world yet to be explored by I and me.
I am a jar of dry camomile leaves turning to shades of sunlight spreading over the river leaving spaces for evening lights.
I am petals of the stars waned to the fragrance of flowers travelling with wanderlust from world to world.
I am insights from colours of black, white, golden, everything. I am a sanctuary of solitude, edging on certainty.

I am the oscillation between feeling brilliant at birthing my art and really quite derided at churning consistent literature.
I am the east London girl left with derelicts of poetry originating from Alfred Hitchcock films.

I am the walk by the sea that gives the feeling of the wind coming off the waves. I am the travel between seasons on railways to off-the-beaten-paths destinations through countrysides and beyond to flea markets collecting memories, soul and travel tchotchkes.


I am Sunday breakfast and tea in bed, buried inside heaps of sheets, using body warmth for shield.
I am pure joy, one whose heart howls with laughter and a face whose grin is as silly as the scowl of a Cheshire Cat with a hissy fit. I am a numismatist and I am the girl who collects stamps and inherits vinyls owned by my father from the 1960s.
I am coffee without cream. I let the days and the weekends amaze me like my time in Hamburg.
I am the random stroll to the local Signorelli bakery to have an almond croissant and fresh Italian latte and a nice chat with the ******* lady.
I am a creation inspired by the likes of Thomas Hardy, Francoise Sagan, Zadie Smith, the humour of Lucy Mangan, and the wit of David Sedaris.

I am her, ambivalent between jaunting between rural and suburban villages, bustling cities and seaside towns. I am soul inspired songs by the Upsetters and likes of Otis Redding’s ‘cigarettes and coffees’. I am stuck between layers of diversity notwithstanding an identity of complexities.
I am the cheateu in the north of Bordeaux where we did that thing and the grandfather clock chimed and we laughed so hard, we choked.
I am excitement yet forgettable like the confetti that drops to the floor after weddings.
I am midnight in Paris and late night strolls on 57th and 6th in New York.

I am a result of the birth of a post term delivery caught unduly unprotected by the amniotic fluids of mother.
I am layers of skin shedding in green and yellow slime because mum had me at the 11th month with a fontanelle that retained ground rice which she ate when she went into labour. A fontanelle that never left and each time I braid my hair by someone new, they tell me of the dent as if it was something new I only just discovered.
I am June created on the first day of summer like Marilyn but could have been April beautifully bore in Spring like April in the TV show, ‘Mistresses’.

I am the heart heaved at a belief swooned towards a soul immortal. I am one who never wants to stop making memories with you, my ‘buh’.
I am ménage a’ moi and I am the Pas de deux as long as I am joie de vivre, then la vie est belle.
I am altered by indie and foreign films that tell elegantly of French girls admirably in love like that of ‘Jeune and Jolie’ and ‘Blue is the warmest colour’.

I am the smell of my ‘babuska’s’ saliva plastered all over my palms as she wipes them clean with her wrapper cloth sealing them in prayers for good destiny and good health.
I am the crux of the patron of St Andrews representing Bajan maidens, Danish singers, Scottish spinsters, Argentine migrants, shell shocked survivors, women wanting to be mothers, gouts, jaws and sore throats.

I am a spanner in the works aggrieved by familiarity and **** taking. I am all there is, transported in my ******, prayer and thoroughness, clear and bright like a snowy Christmas sunny morning.


I am June