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Be Easy, Stay Gold, Live Long and Get Some

by Lauren Singer

From here on out you will be an amorphous blob of stoicism.
You will carry yourself with prudent flare and
your conscience will sound like Christopher Walken giving your
constant commencement speech, because
you 'got this'. You are in for big things. You are
making moves and moving on and getting ready for greatness, kid.

But you're not doing a great job, because
instead you are leaving haikus on crumpled paper in
the booths of all the local eateries you frequent so that someone may
find them like time capsules after you are gone.
You are scrawling bathroom graffiti in bookstores
should someone forget that you came here once, to shit.
You are practically demanding missed connections with
memorable drunken performances, pinching asses and whispering "yolo" like
a creep so that no one will forget that you were the weird girl who moved away.

You're getting stoned at 9am and cradling your dog to your chest,
sobbing to "The Rescuers Down Under" and imagining what this room
is gonna look like when it's empty, or worse, when it's full of
someone else's things, someone else's years of collected sweat, and
dust and skin particles. Someone's residue of love-making, all-night drinking,
dinner-in-bed, sleep til noon, laying awake in someone else's arms just
shooting the shit until it doesn't make sense anymore to move.

You're envisioning this place without you.
All the Tuesday nights you could be stumbling back to the
apartment, high on all those words, stopping by 7-11 for a slurpee and
running into Barry with his tacos, making friends with
Eric who works the register and telling him he's fresh when he burps
after swigging from a can of orange soda.
Grabbing stale bagels from the Dunkin Donuts dumpster and
trying to feed the albino squirrel that lives
behind the junk-house next to your apartment.
Already missing the albino skunk and hoping he remembers you,
and doesn't starve to death when you go.


But it's time to make the preparations, now.
You are closing up shop here. Time to donate clothes, steam-clean the carpets,
pack up the moving van, quit your job, sell your dresser,
buy a new bed, find a place of your own.
Follow through, act without impulse, make a plan.
Let yourself go.

In the meantime you will make a bucket list:
Finally check out that miniatures shop.
Go back to the firefly field at midnight.
Get drunk on the dike. Eat the yak-meat like a champ.
Visit the train tracks. Hike Mt. Tom in the rain.
Go to the Planetarium on a Saturday morning.
Crash the Amherst College Reunion and pretend you're someone's wife.
Get free birth control from Tapestry, get your junk checked.
Play disc-golf and go tubing down Deerfield River.
Make out in the stacks at the Book Mill.
Sing a song with Screaming Thomas of his choice and be his monotone harmony.
Let the people you love know you love them.
Say it a lot. Make them uncomfortable with all your feelings.
Stop being so defensive and unsure. There's nothing left to lose.
Reach for your lover in the night without worrying you're being too forward.
Find out the name of that guy from the Basement bathroom and forget it again.
Make fun of liberal banter and then initiate some.
Bring only the essentials.
Leave the baggage behind.
Bring the possibility of coming back.
Make pinky swears that you will see everyone again real soon.
Buy a spare futon and demand visitors.

You are going to soak up these last morsels.
Lose those implications that seem to govern the idea that
you 'just don't give a fuck'. Because

you give many fucks.
All your given fucks are belong to Noho.

So, stiff upper-lip, kid.
This isn't goodbye.
It's just so long for now.

06/17/2013

Posted on 06/18/2013
Copyright © 2024 Lauren Singer

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