dedication

mike crowley, sudbury mass. november 2008




it is a beautiful fifty-three degrees of warm fahrenheit here in manhattan, a beautiful fifty-three there over my massachusetts love. the clouds look like a new england spring. no spring at all. my mind is back home. our air is the same, except mine has pollution from light and noise (which is really magic when you think about it) and theirs has sea salt you can taste 30 miles inland and the smell of thawing leaves and bad car radio blasting from high schoolers graduating that i've never met (which is really sad when i think about it.)

i love it here. manhattan is a home.

but talking to my roommates last night, one an tough army brat and another who's lived all up and down the west coast, i realized that my word for "home" means something different and impossible.

i've lived in the same bedroom for 18 years. my body's dead skin settles like sedimentary rock in the carpet with the wrinkles i've memorized. i know all of the pictures i saw in the plaster when i was six years old by heart. there's a witch and a prince in the upstairs bathroom wall, a sneezing man in the family room. at three thirty pm in the summer rainbows appear on the wall in the foyer. there are hidden rips on the lower left corner of the blue and brown rug my brother and i used to pretend was full of rivers and islands. there's a plastic swiss-army toy in the left-most drawer that's full of bubble wands instead of knives and corkscrews. i didn't grow for four years and the kitchen wall's pencil marks tell all of our guests. i am always embarrassed and always glad they're there.

to know a place, to have every inch memorized, has only recently revealed itself to me as a gift. stagnancy only gets more and more rare. it was like falling in love too early in life, you know you can't marry, you feel so lucky and so murdered.

so today is dedicated to massachusetts. i only write to you. my life, my past 18 years are a memoir of a place. i'm the lucky secretary to the most beautiful place in the entire world.

sometimes i wonder if i was just born an empty shell, waiting to be filled with a place. that i would have loved wherever i was born so deeply because that was how i was born. but then i realize: no. i feel like a psychologist accepting that i love someone and ignoring necessity and proximity. but it feels so real, this must be how psychologists can manage to have friends.

happy massachusetts day,
happy 53 degree fahrenheit day
happy wednesday
happy memory day
happy hands in old boxes of photographs day
happy moving day
happy missing day


because really my birthday is just the anniversary
of my first time in massachusetts.

love elise