blooming. I put larkspur between the Johnny-jump-ups and the feverfew. Sometimes I’d light a votive next to only one planter to make it feel some particular encouragement and care. I had a sense that it would soon be very cold, colder than I or anything could tolerate. When I went to pee at night I kicked fourteen planters. I never turned on the lights and I eventually understood where to walk to avoid them. My toes are still busted up. My apartment looks like a corn maze for chinchillas. The first shoots are going to bloom in March in April in May. They’re going to be twenty colors. Tom and Mishti took your midterm. The sweet pea is good for strength and the dandelion is good for wish manifestation. Johansen has me working the midnight to five a.m. shift because I’m being put in my place. I feel jet-lagged from noon to midnight but I’ve been jet-lagged since I got expelled. The money is bad but absolutely adequate. Mishti doesn’t come to see me at the bar because she’s a highly competent minor scholar who needs her sleep. I would have given her the bar for free. I walk to and from work with a Bic lighter in my pocket so that if somebody starts mugging me I can at least light it up and see my mugger’s face. Muggers have cool faces. I can’t wait for the cowslip to bloom. Cowslip on your stoop will discourage visitors. Also known as password, peggle, plumrocks. Source of healing, source of appetite, source of treasure-finding.
CHEESE
The week before actual Thanksgiving, the Ecology Evolution & Environmental Biology Department celebrated Thanksgiving in the faculty lounge. I hadn’t yet been removed from their email list and that made me feel less excommunicated. The department wanted to make it clear that this gathering was a favor and an inconvenience, and asked us not to bring any partners. The goal of the party was that it should seem, pretty much immediately afterward, that there never had been any party.
New York has put up with an ultra-cold November and we arrived in our winter clothes, bulk the faculty lounge wasn’t built to accommodate. There weren’t any coat hooks but we also weren’t supposed to put our coats on the chairs. They asked that we remove our shoes. We made a coat pile on the floor, to the left of the shoe pile. We’d known about no partners, but none of us had anticipated the shoe rule, a rule that left everyone shorter and stumpy-looking. Mishti wore extra-long, extra-wide woolen sailor pants that relied entirely on her platform boots. She now looked like a broom. Tom’s socks were one orange one purple. I was miserably and idiotically not wearing socks. I walked around even more hesitantly than usual, afraid that I was infecting the carpet with my toenail fungus.
You were perfect in black tights, black tunic, gray braid. You looked at my toenails with a face that said, You’re a donkey. It seemed like a very dirty trick to return midterms the day of the Thanksgiving party, not giving anyone anywhere to hide or recover, but you hate hiding and recovery. Tom had come for the mulled wine, with the ease of a pass/fail student who’d just passed. The B- you gave Mishti has changed her life. I’ve never seen her cry in public, because she doesn’t like the chemicals that make waterproof mascara waterproof and isn’t interested in making a mess, but she was inconsolable. She’d worn her platforms as armor and even they had been taken away from her.
I wished that she’d been able to bring Carlo, his height would have been a kind of shield and given her a wall to lean against, but no partners meant no Carlo and no Barry, and no Barry made the party worthwhile. Without Barry you are comically incapacitated at social functions. He is your mouth, your hand, your laughter. You stood by the mulled wine crockpot apparently focused on smelling it. I came over to get some.
You didn’t greet me in any way so I poured first and then said, “Professor Kallas.”
“Bartender,” you said.
I was about to launch into a heavy-handed diatribe about people who need to earn a living and people who get by being wealth-adjacent, but Tom came and spared me the humiliation.
“Professor Kallas,” he also said.
To this you responded with great warmth. “Tell Francesca we’re stealing you,” you said. I hated Francesca and didn’t know who she