Eternal Questions

I take a hot bath tonight; an old, sacred ritual. I wash the dishes in my small kitchen and try to ignore the swarms of fruitflies hovering around my face. Afterwards, I sneak outside to the neighbor's lemon tree that hangs low over the dividing cyclone fence. The fat yellow orbs hang high in the tree and I have to stand on my toes to get a decent sized one. I sneak back inside quickly. Though I don't think they will care. I would rather not be caught stealing a piece of citrus from a relative stranger's tree; it just seems slightly undignified. Inside I quarter the fruit and squeeze the juice from each piece into a glass of ice water. The juice bites at the small cuts on my fingers left from hours spent at the metals lab.

I savor the details of these nights, especially as the ones I have left become fewer and fewer. One month from tomorrow I will graduate from college with a degree in (I know) English. In a matter of twenty-four hours I might entertain the thought of becoming an au pair in France, taking a wild adventure cross-dressing adventure in India or some desk job worker in San Francisco. While it isn't 100% accurate to say that I have no idea what I plan to do with my life, I fear I am getting dangerously close to that conclusion.

This afternoon I was walking with Professor Martin to my fiction class when he asked me if I am going to grad school. When I told him no he seemed genuinely surprised. I asked why and he said because I am one of the top graduating students in the English Department. Let me first say that this came as an incredible compliment to me. I am deeply flattered. But let me add to that the fact that it has never even occured to me that I am part of the English Department, let alone a top student within it. I had no idea that professors talk about such things. Multiple professors talk about these things! Talk about me! Sometimes I think this goes to show how very little I take seriously, even when it would really behoove me to take that thing seriously. Maybe I could be on the fast track to a Ph. D in English. Maybe, as way too many people have said to me, I do have a true "professorial" vibe and should run with that. But for whatever reason, I can't go there right now. Or maybe I just won't. Whatever it is, some big part of me refuses to take my life that seriously right now. I want to putter around aimlessly in menial jobs, I want to have torrid love affairs with men who are all wrong for me, I want to pack my possessions into cardboard boxes and flee the country for a year if I so please. Hell, even the fact that I have a pet rabbit seems like an overwhelming responsibility at the moment.

Simply put, this age baffles me. I feel all this potential for greatness in my life. And I don't just mean that figuratively, sometimes I really can feel it, as if this untamed energy is knocking about inside me. I can see my talent and I can hear all about it from others, and that's all wonderful and encouraging but I keep coming back to the same question: what the hell do I do with it all? In reality, I shouldn't need this explained to me. I have the degree. I've lived alone long enough to know how to survive, or at least how not to die. I should be able to figure out how to turn raw talent into honed skill and how to translate that into some semblance of a successful career. A few months back I read this quote in a book called Art and Fear. It said: Fatalism is a species of fear- the fear that your fate IS in your own hands but that your hands are weak. Ever since, those words have been breathing down my neck, echoing in my ear when I try to sleep at night. What if I fuck it all up? What if I take the talent I have and flush it down the toilet? This is the stuff that haunts me.

I don't have the answers just yet. Maybe it will take years for me to find them and maybe some of them will be lifelong quests to answer. The one thing I do know is that I have a hell of a lot of work left on my necklace and a Shakespeare essay due in a week. As they say, one day at a time.