I AM 17. I HAVE A LOT TO SAY.
My mother was around
all the time back then, always walking
in and out of rooms carrying stacks
of laptop computers. She spent most
of her daylight hours blowing dust
out of circuits, fans, motherboards, daughterboards.
Sometimes her little canister would die
and she’d have to use her mouth.
My father was gone all day
every day getting repetitive stress injuries
at the newspaper. He was a journalist
and everyone hated him, even his friends.
Nothing really happened during my entire childhood
so he ended up spending most days
shooting paper footballs through a miniature goal post
he kept in the locked drawer of his desk.
He was rarely kind. And in the few, short
instances he was, it still didn’t seem like it.
Something about his mouth made everything he did
seem either sinister or inept.
He was completely inscrutable except for a period
in the spring of 2004, when he was just sad.
I was young that year and my sister was older.
She came home from college for the whole summer of 2005.
I was 14. She told me not to worry
about other people, not to worry about war, not to worry
about a thing. That was the greatest summer
of my short life. I had no friends. Oh I had people
I talked to at school but once summer hit
it was like every school bus had crashed
headfirst into a wall except the one that was carrying
me and my silver trumpet.
I had that tall kind of joy that you can only feel
when your bones still have another few inches left in them.
My sister and I would watch three movies a day
and never go to the lake. Everybody says it seems
like summer never ends
until it does. But that’s a lie. I knew
so little back then but the one thing I did know
was that all my friends were coming back
and I would once more join them
in the hallways, in the classrooms,
once more join them for hours after school
in the far part of the parking lot
and would continue to do so until I turned 16
and got a job cutting my fingers
on the cheese grater at the Pizza Factory.
After that everything was all work work
work go home Jeremy get your feet off the sofa Jeremy
work work math homework band-aids
and on a good day a little trumpet
and on the best days
all trumpet. I wanted
my life to be about music
but in the end it was about
getting B’s in subjects such as Spanish.
I don’t know, sometimes it feels like those summers
really did never end, they went on forever
and just got
progressively
worse. We like to pretend that one day we just
walk into our adulthood like a congressman
walking into the ocean,
but we all know that’s not true. What really happens
is we walk into the same building
day after day, but every night
some crew comes in and replaces something little—
a lamp housing, the chair of a conference table—
until nothing is the same, until the building is not as we
remembered it at all, until the building is stronger,
up to code but a lot less fun,
and the lighting, the lighting is fluorescent and obscene.
