surviving bouts of intense optimism

I've become one of those people who need people to be alone. It's Friday night and I'm writing in some coffee shop, another generic asshole-in-the-corner-bent-over-overheating-laptop. I prefer the large, communal tables over the small, circular ones. I'm sharing mine with two couples: four boys.

I felt almost unafraid this week. I mean: the pounding disappeared and the tremor in my hands receded farther up my arm. I found I could allow myself more time and fewer hours of work as punishment for my mistakes. I found I could be kind to myself, that opportunities for tiny acts of kindness existed within the twenty-fours already spoken for and apportioned according to tasks and completing three different to-do lists.

I began writing in my journal again. Not long, rambling entries the way I used to. Jot-lists. Mundane things: don't forget your keys! Eat lunch! Visit Sarah after class!

I allowed myself to overstay my welcome in kind company.

Fear and anxiety made me tighten my grip on myself and demand unscrupulous hours. I set the bar so high there was no way to succeed. When I can control nothing else, when I feel trapped in the eye of a whirling storm, my arms go around myself to hold myself steady. Like that will anchor me to the ground.

Secret pleasures revealed themselves in the space between large tracts of unremarkable but overwhelming fear. The universe intervenes, adept at parallel construction.

In my literature class this morning, one student asked a question I thought I'd answered properly via close reading: how do we know we've not over-read a text? or misread a text? 

Two nights prior, I found a suite of poems written by kids aged 9-12. The poems were written as part of the Booklatan sa Bayan Leyte, a National Book Development Board project.

Walang kamalay-malay
Si Tatay na may patay
Doon sa kapitbahay.

-Angelica A. Navarra, 9, Granja Central School 

I read the poems aloud and withheld critical, contextual information until the class formed its opinions and understood the tone and image and the beautiful ambiguity of the words. And only after the class had formed concrete opinions and understood the poems outside their context, did I reveal that the poems had been written by Typhoon Yolanda survivors, children who had learned to live with loss in an extreme environment. Children who continued to live and who turned to the brevity of this form to say, among other things, we are here, we are still here. Then I asked, did we misinterpret the poems when we read them even without the context? How then do we police our own understanding of poems not written with us in mind? By 'us' I meant the social and communal 'us' that is the product of living within the same society, having grown-up with the same set of beliefs. I didn't plan any of this but what I had brought with me on a whim was a good way to explain the difference between reading closely and misreading.

Sometimes, I am sorely tempted to believe in the guiding hand of some benign, higher power. Call it the Universe, call it by the name of a deity. 

laura kimpton and jeff schomberg

After the literature class I wandered up and down the faculty center. I forgot my keys on the dresser in my bedroom at home and the backpack was heavy with papers. I turned toward home my feet were leaden and disobedient. I didn't want to go. That was strange enough. I usually craved the empty hours by myself. Now, I was too afraid of the familiarity of my own room to look forward to another empty afternoon.

The fear expanded beyond its boundaries to conquer new territory: I keep finding small shards of it in unlikely places. On a Katipunan-Campus jeepney at seven in the morning, just before my Wednesday class. I'm afraid of the marks on my bedroom floor where the sealing wax has been scraped off where I drag the chair to and fro. I'm afraid of the floorspace beside my bed where I knot myself smaller still until my hand covers the width of my entire face. I am so small, so small, I remind myself, and you are small, you are small in the lives of the people in your own small life. You are tiny, I tell myself. I can shrink more, I say.

I am obsessed with taking up as little space as possible, hoping the fear will not find me.