Confetti

1

I ask them what they think about. Truly, whatever’s on your mind. Write it down. Anonymously. The mundane. The trivial. The serious. The sublime.

Work, one writes. Sleep. Dexter. My best friend’s cystic fibrosis.

Stress, says another. Responsibility. Israel. Career.

Money, another says. Sandwiches. Parties. Girlfriends.

Being an asshole, someone writes, and following, in parentheses, (many regrets). There are a few specific examples, the student says. I wonder if it’s a he, a she, a they.

They are juniors and seniors, students at a small liberal arts college. We meet in a tiny room with arched windows in early afternoon light. It’s September in California. A heat wave is on. We sweat, then turn on the AC, then shout because its noise is too loud.

Soon it will be winter, rainy and cold. It’s my twelfth year of teaching here. Every year is different, every year the same.

We’ll talk about Joan Didion, what it’s like to be young, to eat that peach, to walk those streets of New York. We’ll talk about the deceptive dissolve of emotion and time. We’ll talk about real time. Structure. Scene. Movement. Form. We’ll talk about what they talk about in classes devoted to fiction. Character and conflict and how people change or barely change, how time is the great deliverer of plot for us all.

But there is something else.

Us—characters on the page and characters in the classroom.

2

Write down what you are thinking. You can make something out of this, I tell them. Your life. Your thoughts. Nothing is too random. Nothing is stray.

They are thinking of Santa Cruz.

What they are going to do after class.

What they are going to write about. Cheese.

Terrorism.

Henry Ford.

About whether their boyfriend will be at their house tonight. About their dog. Their paycheck. Their student loans.

They are thinking about moving into an apartment with their boyfriend.

They are thinking about buying weed.

They write on index cards that are yellow, pink, purple, blue—cards that remind me, I say, of elementary school. They’re a way to brainstorm ideas for what to write about, to practice before the real thing.

They are thinking about work, sex, lunch, planes.

Pumpkin spice lattes.

This terrible heat.

They are thinking about how profound the mundane can be. (This student writes in small, sturdy letters.)

What should I make for dinner tonight? another says. (This one’s handwriting is pained and pinched.)

They are thinking about getting wasted tomorrow. (The handwriting, no kidding, careens off the card.)

About marriage.

About sushi.

About grades.

And sex, always sex.

I’m never working a 4:00 to 11:00 p.m. shift on a school night ever again, one writes. I need a car, the same person says.

The eros of the classroom. The romance of the page. It’s simple, really. The surprise and pleasure of the intimacy of someone’s mind.

Kanye’s latest album—amazing, someone writes. And girls . . . always girls.

3

I ask them one day to make a list of their identities: what they are, what they think they are, how others see them, as near as they can tell.

Keep in mind, I say, that we are conflicted, contradictory, interestingly mixed.

I am a psych major, a surfer, a beach fanatic, an adrenaline junkie, one writes.

I am a partner, a writer, a planner, a mess.

I am perpetually hungover, a third says. A believer who sometimes thinks doubt is cool. And I am tired in the spiritual sense.

I am a know-it-all who hates know-it-alls, a good student, lonely.

I am equally desperate for and terrified of love.

I am the oldest, a former gymnast, afraid of sex, always late.

I am a poet who hates poets. A player who loves to paint. A drummer with no future in music. A writer who doesn’t write.

There is an ice-cream addict. A tobacco lover. A neobeatnik extraordinaire. A baker who burns cookies. A brother. An uncle.

Confident but insecure.

An intelligent idiot.

A virgin who thinks only about sex.

A stoner who hates smoking.

A Christian who cusses too much.

I am a pothead. I am lost. I am afraid.

I am a friend. An animal lover. A pigeon. A sandwich.

I am from a divorced family.

I am happy but always sad.

4

It’s the end of October, Halloween, a Friday afternoon, raining. The cards are our ritual now, our habit, our collective talismans. There’s something comforting about writing together, about doing it anonymously, making our lists, facing our fears—or starting to, anyway.

What troubles you, haunts you, keeps you up late into the night? I ask.

Clowns, one writes. Time. Truth. Criticism. Disappointment. Not being in control.

Losing someone close, another writes.

Cheetos. Parties. Barefoot Merlot.

Leaving people behind.

My grandmother’s violence. The partiality of her love.

When I didn’t say Be careful when I left.

When I didn’t look back.

When I took the last bite.

Times I awkwardly talked to girls. Times when I say things that are not correct.

When I wasn’t there for him. When I failed him.

That I can’t save him from himself.

That I couldn’t give her comfort.

That I never tried out for the play.

That I walked out.

That I didn’t ask her out.

That I never told her I loved her. That I’ve never really been in love.

When I read the cards out loud, our ghosts fill the room.

When I ask them what they are afraid to write, their pencils move, their minds in motion, no one at a loss for what’s tender to the touch.

What is it about these notecards that makes the writing easier? Or not easier, but possible. Like wearing a mask. Like walking into a party with confidence.

One writes, I’m afraid to write how my mother is not the person I thought she was when I was growing up.

Another writes, I’m afraid to write that my mom may be dying and my parents are hiding it.

I’m afraid to write about my boyfriend who is a felon.

I’m afraid to write about love because I don’t want to sound stupid.

And: I’m afraid to write about how weird I used to be. And: I’m afraid about how much I used to get grounded.

I’m afraid to write about the only time I gave a fake blow job in public.

I’m afraid to write about the one and only relationship I’ve had.

One writes about an aunt and uncle’s nasty divorce. Another about her mother’s anger and inability to understand.

Another writes, I’m haunted by the person I used to be.

This is the one I read and reread again and again. Is that it? That the real ghostly presence here is who we used to be? I think of the past and night terrors, and the present and its cruel tricks of shadowy half light. Is this why there’s something frightening but holy in attempting to list—and banish—the fears that keep us in hiding?

I’m haunted by love lost, someone writes. Drunken infidelity. The monster I’ve become.

That’s the same person who writes something for all of us in the room, for writers wandering aimlessly, dead and alive: I’m scared shitless to write about any and all of the above.

5

It’s November now. Only a few classes left. I’m happy because in a few more weeks, I will return to my own work, to my ghosts, my lists, my subjects that scare me shitless.

Your subject is loneliness, someone told me once. I immediately wanted this someone to take it back. I immediately knew it was true, too.

What have you learned? I ask. What comes to mind? I’m thinking of what we concentrated on here, on issues of craft: scene and summary; sentence styles and accumulation; how characters change—or don’t change—over time.

But their minds are elsewhere. On their lives. On what happened outside the classroom.

How nice it is to be nice when all you want to do is criticize. That religion is hard to define. That having a friend far away sucks. That school debts suck and you always feel poor.

I’ve learned that hanging a blanket over my window makes my apartment warmer than my heater does. To enjoy this very moment I’m living in. To be flexible. To love again.

That Pink Floyd is still better than any other band. To keep it simple. That sometimes you pay a little extra for good wine and it makes you feel like a person. That Shakespeare is boring.

To be myself.

That I am a dick.

That my girlfriend sucks and so do I. That bills suck and people suck.

That coffee is a lifesaver. That alcohol and math do not mix.

That sometimes you need to study.

That the word fuck makes college students laugh.

I have earned not to take acid after 6:00 p.m.

Don’t eat too much meat. Don’t flirt yourself into a corner.

And if you think about trying to be funny, you won’t be.

I have learned how to trust the reader, another writes, that I have stories to tell, that I’m a good writer but I have lots to learn.

I have learned my mother has issues. Never to combine tequila with a loaf of bread. That I don’t need Adderall to study.

I have learned the meaning of a comma splice, that an albino family of raccoons lives nearby, that I can’t do it all, that there is an art to knowing how to fake a smile.

How beautiful the country is, one student writes. How awful sleeping on a couch can be. How different we all are. How beautiful it is to be vulnerable.

I read their lessons and think how suspicious I am of that word, lessons, how the notion of it gives me hives. And yet. It’s true, there are lessons. Reasons to take note. I have learned that classes, like stories, have a natural rhythm, a familiar, aching arc; that there is something lovely in the accumulation of days; that teaching grounds me, makes up for what I’m not. Not a mother. Not what I thought I would be.

Despite my coolness and how eager I appear for each semester to end, there is something sad about it, the brevity of a single term. Even so, I have learned to enjoy it: the beginning when I mix up students’ names, the middle when I chase them down for late papers and critiques, the end when I say—and I mean it—no essay is perfect, no story, no book, no class. Nothing is perfect. Such a relief! All, a work in progress!

I give their lists a string of imaginary stars, pack up the notecards, stuff their final essays into my bag. I say my good-byes and they say theirs. It’s a small campus. We will see each other, I say, though in reality, I know many of us won’t.

In the basement of a house there’s still a pink room. A childhood bedroom. A green box. The box belonged to my mother, who gave it to me. As a child, I kept treasures: letters stamped from Barcelona, Grenoble, Istanbul; smooth coppery stones; newspaper clippings; cards from my older sister as she traveled through Europe; finds from the wide field behind our house; news of a dance teacher, newly engaged.

Later, in another box, I gathered for the future, one which seemed inevitable for young women like me: a tiny blue sweater with heartshaped buttons; a pocket-size Beatrice Potter book; gift-shop purchases from the Metropolitan Museum of Art—Baby’s First Photos, Baby’s First Book.

Years passed after I moved out of the small pink room, years when I was religious, then something else. Years when I traveled, then settled in. Years when everything—especially love, especially work—remained unsteady. In those years, I’d come visit my parents and sleep in my old pink bedroom. For a long time, I meant to give the contents of that second box—the sweater, the book, the unused albums for baby—away.

But I never did.

It’s late on Friday night when I leave my office, walking past empty buildings under dark December trees.

Briefly I consider turning our semester’s worth of index cards into confetti, throwing them up into the air—our writing, anonymous and personal simultaneously.

How beautiful, I think, trees full of slivers of written-down lives, the notes, the practicing, which is, it turns out, not adjacent to but center stage. The real thing.

How beautiful it is, the end of the semester, the air full of possibility.

Read more from Issue 16.1.