Mona Lisa

The funny thing about cyber stalking is you feel like you know a person you’ve never met. So when your ex walked in to order coffee, her face registered immediately. It was like finally being in the same room with the Mona Lisa after only ever seeing copies, like finally getting to observe the details up close when all you’ve heard is lecture after lecture after agonizing lecture, like breathing in a history you could only ever dream of participating in but could never touch. And when she smiled it certainly felt like something worth writing novels and screenplays and poems about. Maybe you thought it was Mona herself because you ran to hide the moment you saw her, but you always were one to run from things you can’t understand. 

You know, they say that the portrait of Mona Lisa is the most parodied piece of art ever created. People are always trying to recapture the same magic. You have made a life of it. It’s like you went to Paris once and saw a smile, and you’ve been asking every face since to give you that same feeling. You can’t let go of the girl who sat for you, who posed just like you told her to until she got uncomfortable and decided to exist for something other than your admiration. So you keep dressing them up and telling them to sit where she sat and entreating them to give you a smile, and it all seems so romantic until the final stroke is made and the brush drops and you realize this isn’t the portrait you wanted. It’s just a parody. 

Well, I was never one for doing what I’m told. I prefer to stand and not to sit, to dress myself with the colors of everything I am, to smile only when something is truly worthy of my delight. But I can understand how you made the mistake of thinking I would entertain your whims and reveries. I approached you with the timidness of someone who had long heard of your work, and I asked you to make me into something like a masterpiece too soon before learning you are just a copy artist. You tried, though - that’s the thing. You tried. And I thought all of your effort meant that it must be working, that the frame would finally fit, and that I would soon be admired by all whom you allowed to gaze in my direction. But I’ve never been to Paris. 

So Mona Lisa smiled in my direction, not knowing that a few shorts months ago my face had been painted to look like hers, and you ran because you’ll never understand why she stopped smiling at you. She got her coffee to go because she never sticks around for long, and you wouldn’t love her if she did. Something hung in the air when she walked out. I think it was the thought that maybe she had never really been there in the first place, and maybe it was the thought that she had never really existed. The funny thing about cyber stalking is also the funny thing about art history text books. You spend all this time studying faces that you may never see in real life, and the thing is that you’d never know if they didn’t exist at all. So maybe you went to Paris, and maybe you didn’t. But I do know that you will never find the girl with the smile you thought you saw. She doesn’t exist.

To the girl with the red hair he never wanted you to cut,

To the girl with the red hair he never wanted you to cut, 

Freedom looks good on you. 

When I met you, I could barely see you because you were hiding in your hair and in the shadow of someone who always wanted to make himself seem bigger than you. I couldn’t see you, and you scared me the way that all mysterious things do. So he became a friend because I could see him, and you disappeared beneath the mask he gave you. 

I wanted to cry when he invited me to your wedding. I wanted to cry because I finally felt so included. He has this funny way of making people feel special just because he deemed them worthy of his attention, you know? Of course you know. So I cried because it felt like family when he spoke to me, and I hoped that you would be there to welcome me, too, between the dancing and the hiding and the nervous laughter. But I couldn’t actually go to your wedding in the end, so we kept out of touch as you fell deeper down the rabbit hole. 

I remember when you cut it. I walked into the coffeeshop, and you were standing there with short hair. I think I was holding my breath waiting for him to react, as if it had just happened, just fallen off or something, and he’d be furious that you didn’t do anything to stop it all from happening. But he stood there, making himself big, and for the first time you were peeking through his shadow - just enough for the light to fall on your face. And I saw the beginnings of a girl who would be resurrected. 

I watched the death come for you from a distance, and it wasn’t until you both had been consumed by it that he put words over the silent film. Divorce doesn’t sound real until it’s happening to someone that could have been you. It’s something that’s only supposed to happen to parents and people who get married in Vegas. Still he said the word like it was normal, like this was the way the story was always meant to unfold, like it was in the script he had rehearsed since he got the part. 

This is not to say that he wasn’t sad - of course he was. He was smaller than I had ever seen him, and he sat there shrinking more and more as the minutes passed. I remember thinking that you must’ve grown too big for him to control, like a wild vine that started as a weed on the ground, only to scale the wall and overtake the whole house. I remember wanting to see you and cry with you and tell you that I understand the hiding and the growing pains that come when you finally break into the light. I remember being glad I didn’t see you dance at your wedding. 

When I saw you standing behind the counter of a different coffeeshop months later, I didn’t know how to act. It was like seeing you for the first time, like you were a stranger I had known forever, like maybe you had escaped from that room inside my mirror. I said it was good to see you and asked how you’d been, even though I knew the answer was heavier than the fake smile you made as you said the words, “I’ve been good.” And I think you doubted those words more than I did because I could finally see you, and I knew that had to mean that you were waking up from a long sleep and that good was only a few breaths away. 

The rest of that year was complicated. You ran away to yourself in the mountains, and I kept stumbling over love in coffeeshops. Something was happening to both of us that meant seeing and being seen, and we fell into a world online where we could finally break that years-long silence. It happened slowly. I couldn’t even tell you who took the first step, but we built a friendship through likes and reblogs and shares and comments - both of us creating a safe space to come out of hiding. So when I finally saw you again, it felt like coming home. 

Can you believe we knew each other two years before ever sitting down across from each other with a cup of coffee? When we finally did, the words poured out of us like a breath that had been held for much too long. It was sloppy and messy and perfect, and it meant something more than the moment could hold. I didn’t see you for a while after that, but there was something perfect about that, too. I had finally seen you, and I knew I’d be seeing you again. 

When we went out for that photoshoot how ever many months later, the winds changed. There was something about the day we spent together that settled it, that meant breaking our old patterns and coming into the light together. And the times I saw you after that made the whole complicated thing worth it. What was once only online or only in line at the coffeeshops had taken its rightful place across the table at dinner and side by side at parties and sharing drinks in the spirit of the holidays. But that sweet season was cut short too soon. 

What I mean when I say that season was cut short is to say that it had to be because we both know that freedom means cutting things short. I cut off my time in that place the same way you cut off your hair and for the same reason. He never wanted you to cut it, and she never believed I would. And if the cutting is what it takes for us to be free, I can count on the both of us to do it when we are ready. I can count on us because we do what it takes to see and be seen, you know? We are the chasers of the light. 

I hope that light leads us back to the same line again and that the woman in your mirror lets you grow out your hair as long as you want to. Freedom looks really good on you. 

I’ve run away to myself in those mountains, and it’s the chase I’ve been meaning to cut to since the first scene.

Until next time, 

the girl with the ties she never thought I would cut 

This is postgrad. Don't panic.

Congratulations.

It’s over. 

Don’t panic.

You made it through these past four years, plus or minus a few and a half.

You probably counted down the days, maybe you’ve been counting since High School began. You’ve imagined this year, said the number over and over in your mind a million times. I bet when we flipped the calendars this January, you said to yourself, “This is it. This is the year I graduate college.”

Maybe you already have those four numbers written in ink on your wall, in a book, on your skin. The string of them somehow belongs to you, always has, always will. This is your year. 

You made it. 

Don’t panic.

So you walk the stage and extend your hand to take hold of everything the last four years have meant, neatly rolled or folded, tucked away not in shame but pride.

It bears your name. Do you recognize it? They’ve only called you that for the past twenty years. You heard it just now - it ushered you across the stage, told your feet to move. 

Does it mean the same as it did when you started? 

Maybe your slip of paper has a title, has a category, has honor. Maybe it just has some initials.

Those letters carry the weight of a world or two - nights past spent bent over ink and wood, days future spent bent over numbers and lines and makings of a vocation. 

You’ve been bent, and you’ll keep bending.

Don’t break. 

Don’t panic.

There’s a scene, a party. 

Pictures are taken, posted, smiles locked forever beneath a crooked cap. 

This is worth celebrating. 

You did what they told you to do. You did what you always swore you would. You’ve earned this moment. 

Maybe there’s a string of moments, a trip, a whole week of celebration. Enjoy every last drop. Drink of the exhilaration, the freedom. This is your year, after all. 

And then close your eyes. You’re going to at the end of the night anyway. 

Close them tight. And sleep. 

Maybe this is the first good sleep in four years.

Wake up.

Don’t panic. 

There’s a time when the celebration wears off, when you stop dreaming because they’ve all come true, when the sleep doesn’t mean what it used to, and you can’t remember why you wanted this in the first place. 

You’ll wish for the busyness and the studying and the long nights if it means you can have purpose again, if you can live with your friends in that place again, if you can hear people tell you who you are and what you’re worth again. 

Freedom isn’t ever what you think it is. 

There’s always a price, always a cost, always a want for old yokes and stale burdens. 

Freedom can’t live without fences.

Where will you build them?

You have choices to make.

Don’t panic.

You are the clock maker. 

You choose where the time goes, what you will do with it, when it will start and when it will end.

No one is deciding for you anymore.

On your mark. 

Set the alarm. Set the goals. Set the scene. 

Go.

Don’t forget to go.

Don’t panic.

What’s wrong?

Are you disappointed? 

Is this part not what you thought it would be? Don’t tell me. Did the world let you down again? It can’t be the first time.

Where is your ring? Where is the security? 

Where are the things you were promised?

The conveyor belt stops here. Didn’t anyone tell you?

You’re on your own now. 

But you have us. 

Don’t panic. 

We are the forerunners. 

We have stood where you’re standing. 

We are here to tell you not that it gets better, but that it gets different. 

We learned the secret no one else would tell us:

College isn’t the best time of your life. 

No, these are the glory days - 

The Mondays you choose to show up, like it means something.

The Tuesdays that make up for yesterdays.

The Wednesdays you learn to make peace with. 

The Thursdays that turn into Fridays that turn into weekends that turn into memories, and suddenly you’re going and you’re living and you know it’s okay.

Because it is okay. 

It’s okay. 

Don’t panic.

Years pass, and you look at the wall where that slip of paper hangs. 

Maybe you are everything it says you are, and maybe you’ve changed.

Maybe you’ve gotten a new name, added some letters, gotten a few more medals of honor. 

Wherever you are, you’ve made choices. 

You’ve made it up as you’ve gone because that’s all we ever do. 

And now when you close your eyes, there are new dreams that no one ever told you that you could have at your age. 

And age, you’ll learn, might just be a number after all. 

And after all you’ve learned and seen and done, you will choose whether you’re happy or not.

No one has it figured out. No one has everything they’ve ever wanted. 

We only have each other. We only have these glory days.

We only have the rest of our lives. 

This is the rest of your life.

This is postgrad.

Don’t panic.