This semester, I have had the great scheduling fortune to take classes that pertain exactly to the central focuses of my major concentration. Specifically, I've been able to revisit the writing of the Beat Generation and, with my time now dedicated to them rather than distracting me from them, I've become re-inspired by their writing. In response, I've begun writing spontaneous prose and have included some scraps of what I've done below.

I wonder if, should we think about today from a future perspective, we damn ourselves. Today, tomorrow, the next three years; if we daydream about them for all of five minutes, will they become just that? Am I seeing the future or putting a hex on what is to come? Will I know when I get there or will this all feel like deja vu eventually, an itch I’ll undoubtedly just shrug off?

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I keep thinking about driving home on Christmas Eve and looking up through the edge of the window as the light seemed to dance above like sentient beings. And I’m thinking of “A Last Reading” and laying on the floor of Dobbs and how I want to know how everyone else sees the world.

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“Came to Buddha in those hours the realization that all things come from a cause and go to dissolution, and therefore all things are impermanent, all things are unhappy, and thereby and most mysterious, all things are unreal.” -”Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha”, Jack Kerouac

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There is something cold coming over the tops of aging trees. There is a street I can’t name and the overwhelming desire to rest my head on someone else’s sweatered shoulder. It’s heavy and I’m afraid it’s going to fill the space behind my ribs, that it won’t thaw until spring. There’s Atlanta out the corner of the window and I’m spinning around Downtown until we found parking for biscuits. There’s Central Park in December that I left something behind.

I miss Audrey’s soccer games and my ugly bubblegum pink sweater. I miss the things that I’ve found because the skyline just beyond the trees is making me feel like they’re the very things I lost.

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“...you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.” - “All Over But the Shoutin’”, Rick Bragg

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(tonight seems to be the night I reconnect with all of my past selves, lined up on the windowsill in the breeze)

first, she exists with her feet on the wall beneath the open window. curtains billowing, voices trailing, and the sun setting behind the trees.

second, she sits in hot pink leggings at a white desk staring at the dusk setting on the world. beyond the edges of her house lies the immense weight of change, waiting.

then, hiding behind a baseball hat in a silent room, reading her eyes grew as stiff as the book’s pages.

then, in a study lounge at the turn of day.

then, alone in a room for two.

then again dancing at midnight surrounded by nothing more than herself.

it’s always a different view, a different window. but it’s always the same nagging sense one might get when something takes their breath away, something fated and comfortable. it is the whole world settling and the breeze drifting in. it is it is it is i am i am i am