For us excitable, wild-eyed first years, we will be drawing up to the end of our first 2 months or so of college. My life in Mount Holyoke has been pretty steady so far. I didn’t think think that would be the case - what with moving across the planet, starting over and all. But I honestly don’t remember having even a single perfectly peaceful week my entire senior year in high school.

This stillness at Mount Holyoke has allowed me some time to reflect about where I am in my present emotional landscape, and who/what I want to focus my time on. It’s driven me to revisit old poems, and this one in particular, I thought I might share.

I wrote In Five Years around this time last year - when college apps were looming round every corner, and I taunted deadlines with professional-level procrastination. It came from my frustrations with all the interviews — being given 25 minutes to win someone over with my “charisma;” what I could bring to the table as a student, as a consumer; how I would contribute to their respective ecosystems; and most of all, talk about all the great things I’ve done in a humble-sounding way.

It felt wrong. I was well aware of what I was doing; I wasn’t there to be a genuine person, I was there to sell my brand, to list out all the great things about me and persuade a school to invest in me. The simple knowing of that seemed to negate the humility.

I often had to remind myself that I am worth more than my resume of accomplishments. The good I’ve done in this lifetime is shown by the people I’ve connected with- both in small and large capacities - as a strange friend, or friendly stranger; a source of affirmation on difficult days, or a comforting set of limbs to be held by. All these are infinitely more important than a resume.

In Five Years is a cheeky, somewhat indignant response to a question I got in every one of those interviews:

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

In Five Years

I want to be turpentine stains and unshaven legs

with the paint-splattered bedroom and tarpaulin bed sheets.

I want to be the sparkling eyes Fitzgerald wrote about -

unnamed magnetic woman

the writer, the muse, with blue paint pumping through her veins.

I wanna fall in love too easily,

getting drunk under the full moon

spontaneously reciting Whitman with closed eyes and toes laced into the grass.

I want to break into other people’s homes

just to watch their TV and pet their cat.

Then leave, touching nothing else.

I want to build fires in some abandoned railway

passing stories between friends and beers till we all fall asleep.

I’ll earn just enough to make end’s meet

by making art nobody understands

but it made the hipsters feel hipper so they always came to see it.

I’ll live in a little trailer,

separate but adjacent from my partner,

and we don’t believe in the institutions of marriage

but we share a pet parrot who we’ve taught to bark whenever the wind chimes ring.

And there’ll never be a silence in my kitchen

because the neighbour’s children come and play when mom’s out working,

drumming pots and pans and paper plates,

and they are loved,

and well-versed in feminist theory.

I want to be the woman women want and the woman men want to be.

Hell, I want to be gender-bending anomaly.

I want to jump across roofs yelling youth.

I want the world, 3 generations down, to read and study my generation -

write thesis papers on my generation -

who shot up and poured streams of consciousness onto 10 meter rolls of typewriter paper.

I want to be counter culture’s poster child.

I want the state to try and sue me for obscenity.

I wanna be the 2am artist

walking barefoot through the dusty streets

who stayed up all night getting high, talking dreams to her numerous lovers

who never needed much money because she had built herself a family - people just like her

who meditated every morning, spoke sign language, and went to college but never needed her degree because she had soul.