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Behold the lavish tent under which the overeducated mingle, well versed in every art but the one of conversation.
Whatever response I offer—an earnest confession of my own imminent failure, a bald-faced lie that sets my face aflame—will elicit the same knowing nod, the same world-weary smile, a delivery of platitudes about the Process being elusive, the Work being a difficult mistress.
Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things? my mother always asked me. I don’t know, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.
That not being understood is a privilege I can’t afford. That I can’t believe this woman got paid to come here. That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess.
But I doubt you did any of those things unless you have a mullet or a deep sense of irony.
Always, always doing the reading. The truth is, if you go to Warren, no matter what is going on in your personal life—hair trouble, existential malaise, ax murder—you do the reading.
A hybrid. That most obscure of academic beasts. What you call something when you just don’t know what you’re doing anymore.
Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.
Responsibility is what I feel. Ethical-moral obligations. Because you simply can’t sit back and allow your best friend to date an animal-man of your own creation and say nothing.
A pause so pregnant it delivers, consumes its own spawn, then grows big with child again.
Wake from the nightmare of themselves. Become graduate students again, the sensible creatures they must once have been.
