2024
The Tree
My 2023 reflection is late and it’s already 2024. Like I imagine many others are, I’m desperately clawing myself out of the world of relaxation in order to try to get something accomplished. Too many days spent doing nothing were beginning to hurt my stomach.
I started by looking through my camera roll to get some visual material, some primary source. I found
- Screenshots of tweets on how dire the chances were of getting into an MFA program
- Writing in my Dad’s house, computer in the foreground, and walls in the background, unfinished with swarths of white paint on them. Stripes that are now covered over with gray and green.
- Pictures of food I made. Salad dressings in my new apartment as I slowly recovered from the disaster of not having an apartment at the end of 2022. Shots of bread rising in the oven.
- The classroom, students smiling, jokes with colleagues. Fun but with the knowledge beneath the surface that I couldn’t take another year of this, of being an Associate Teacher, the knowing that I couldn’t turn 30 doing the same thing I was doing at 26.
- Rejections. Nine screenshots of MFA rejections, plus a paper one because Iowa has to be different. Rejections from 3 literary journals. My first good rejection, “I think this piece has a lot of potential. It is fun and balances the light with the larger really well.” This year 12 next year 100.
My next source for reflection was OneNote, a silly little app I use because in high school I thought it was cool, every year there is a folder “Journals 2023” where I keep my Sunday notes. Sunday is, of course, a great day for me to freak out and the only way I know to put myself back together again is by writing.
I thought these notebooks would be rife with funny material, but it’s mostly just me complaining and being sad. There was one moment that I thought was truly interesting, I wrote out on April 4th what my ideal life would look like in a year, and more or less I’m there right now, which is crazy. I wonder if I thought it would be easier.
Things that I learned:
This year I’ve learned to be busy. That I need to chase my tail, and if I ever want to have a career in publishing I must run around like everything is on fire at all times. The trouble relaxing, the only time my blood was rushing over the holidays was when my Mom walked away to change for a party leaving me in charge of three dishes cooking on the stove and two in the oven with no instructions. The, “why do one thing when doing five different things will be more fun?” The ultimate balancing act for a creative, focus on just doing one thing well or taking as many shots as possible hoping that one makes it in.
Questing for validation. Does this professor like me enough? Do they see potential in me? Do they care about my work? Comparing myself to other writers even when I know it isn’t the right thing to do. I worked all Thanksgiving break on a final essay only for the professor to not like it and ask me to do another one, a move that brought me to the point of tears. I was depressed that I had even cared what he thought enough to try.
The scheming. The bullshit nonsense. Things that fell through the cracks, things I said I was going to do but never did. The not texting back. The 237 unread text messages in my phone. The days when I woke up to write, went to work, went to class, went back to work, and then went to bed.
Chasing success. Have I suffered enough for my art? Am I delusional? Will every success be a reminder that I didn’t work hard enough to actually earn it? Is my fantasy of writing something other people care about so far away that it is a hallucination?
Solving the problem of habitual writing. My strong habit at the beginning of the year, ‘write for one hour six days a week,’ I marked little x’s in my journal every day underneath the date. To the fall where I had so much work to do that I had no other option than to write every day. The turn from wanting to be consistent to not feeling ok unless I was working on a project, finishing something and starting a new thing that same day. Nine days on vacation without writing, minus the two days on vacation I wrote and the two other times I wrote on my phone in the bathroom to stop feeling insane.
Beans and rice, not taking cabs, avoiding restaurants, student loan debt, random $100 charges that can ruin me have become the new normal. Not paying the electricity bill from August until December and Jack rightfully getting mad at me. My glasses broke and I tried to repair them with masking tape, one side always falling off like a monocle.
Three decades.
A few days ago I drove my sister to her friend’s house. They were heading back to NYC from PA before me so they could do something fun in the city. On my way home I went to Barnes & Noble and got depressed in the way only corporate bookstores can make you depressed. As I was driving home I felt this pull magnetic, I drove past my Mom’s. I parked her car in the familiar spot where I used to park my black Saab, my Dad’s, the one with the telephone in it 2019-2020. Next to the house with the peach door. The black Saab with Vermont plates had rust over the back left wheel and a trunk full of tools and dirty paper towels.
I walk down the street, through the small park. In Malvern there is a field called Paoli Battlefield Park and in that park there is a tree that is my favorite tree. It is the site of a Revolutionary War battle.
When I moved back from China on August 15, 2019, to live with my Mom, I would write every day and then I would walk, and at the end of my lap I would walk by that tree and think without fail, “Wow that’s a beautiful tree. It looks like a heart.” Sometimes I would bring the family dog Barney with me. I walked there the day I chipped my tooth in the Italian restaurant right down the street, and I walked there the day before I had my wisdom teeth pulled out. I was walking there now, my tooth was repaired, the physical parts of my body different, my cells subdivided and replaced, but the walk the same. I walked when I was happy, sad, depressed, hopeful, melancholy, and calm.
Footsteps on top of footsteps. I used to walk the park thinking about how on this same ground people like George Washington had once walked. Had I stepped in the exact same spot as his boot, our soles touching like in Vonnegut? As I walked recently I walked the same path as I did when I was 25, was I standing on top of a footprint of the white sneakers that Rodman in Shanghai had bought me for my birthday? Was I on top of one of Barney’s hoofprints, him so old that I would only take him on the path when I felt bad for him, or his constant pacing around the house became too much, the click-clacking of his overgrown nails on the wooden floor of the kitchen too much for anyone to bear. When was his last walk on the path? Was he happy in that moment, focused, trying to remember what the sunlight felt like illuminated on his face and back? Did he know it was his last? What was the first time I walked on the path alone after he died? Did I even notice? Smiles and tears watering the grass beneath my shoes. Why did some force drag me here today? Is this the last time I’ll ever walk on this battlefield, cover my tracks, step in my own footprints? Will the bottom of my shoes spread some new seed, germinate the ground, or just kill what’s beneath them? After I die will someone walk on this ground in the same place as my footstep and smile, feel a warm breeze of spirit, or a melancholy that I imbibe through their breath because I miss being able to walk this damp ground?
I grew up in so many different places that I always felt complicated and from nowhere. It occurs to me now that maybe this park is the closest I’ll ever have to a place. Maybe the next time someone asks me where I’m from I should just show them a picture of my favorite tree say, “Here” and move the fuck on.
Thank you for reading.
-Luke
P.S. I’m going to try and be more consistent in 2024 on here. Good things are coming!