It was a bird in a cage

cold war bunker / nantucket MA july 09





warm war bunker / nantucket MA july 09






I just had the most refreshing sleepless lay-down I've ever had. I feel so good, and new. Lesson learned: embrace your insomnia.


HELLO AGAIN, EVERYTHING

what is DEAD SERIOUS

1. sociopaths
2. "liking someone" a la 4th grade
3. staying up all night to make sure you don't miss your 7 am bus


4. killing yourself over liking someone from 7 am til 12 pm on your way home (this is presumptuous)



i am a gigantic
wimp

g'night happy thanksgiving

home alone

nantucket island, mass.

how did you get here

nantucket island, middle of july




well, we used a car, a bicycle, and our feet


it's funny how i wanted to go to The Promised Land (new york city) and now that i'm here i want to go to The Promised Land (new england)

i wish new york city hadn't gotten so heavy and immovable or else i'd dig it up and move it to somewhere in the berkshires




wish i could stop thinking about the particle accelerator
wish i knew html as well as i did in 8th grade
wish i had answers for everybody
wish i could make paper snowflakes as well as him
wish dancing was less socially conspicuous
wish multivitamins worked
wish i had more time to listen to jay-z



massachusetts + nyc = ULTIMATE PROMISED LAND

LETS DO THIS folks come on, gather your caterpillar owning friends and lets dig this damn city up

when i get to boston i'll send a postcard
To: The City of New York
Wish you were here!
Love: Massachusetts

happy birthday, big brother

nate & robin, nantucket island. july 2009



today is dedicated to

NATHAN LARGESSE,

the best brother of all time,
now twenty three years of age,
who i love with all of my heart,
who will do beautiful incredible things and make daring attempts and successes and have immense happiness as the giant squid of the largesse family.
happy birthday, nate. thank you for being my brother.


love,
elise

Ouch Ouch, That's So Important

matt and nantucket massachusetts 8/09



Well my computer was broken for a week or so, and it reminded me to tell you to take extra effort in not spending 3 years of your life watching commercials, because apparently, most of us do by the end of it.

And by "it" I mean the end of your life.



Sincerely and Hopefully,
Elise

been missing porches, real mailboxes

long pond docks, nantucket massachusetts



it's really hitting me now, that this is the final push towards the Rest of my Life, i have a couple weeks til the GRE's, have to write my rationale, my IAPC, present my colloquium, get fluent in those 25 books, figure out if those teeth growing in can stay there, get some lenses because i can't see anything and stay healthy stay sane stay good stay kind.
some days i wake up and walk in the city and know i could never leave it
and some days i wake up and think i could never stay here
can i just take you all with me, we'll have a house with a veranda in iowa city or oaxaca,
i just don't know if i can trust a small town again after a big town brought me you.

starched collar girls

matthew on smith's point july 2009, mass.




summer was beautiful but school is just feeling so good. there's nothing quite like a goal, or that lovely illusion of working towards a glowing noble purpose for us goal-oriented animals. when it's not about finding and killing your food, when it's not about a safe place to sleep or staying warm anymore, it has to be about something else. we'd all go crazy and destroy ourselves from a lack of a goal if it wasn't for Learning. or i would.

getting up early and having just enough time for an apple feels good. empty pretty friendly-city-looking streets in the morning feel good. yawning in class feels good.

i'm an okay waitress but a better student. i love the restaurant but it challenges me in ways i know i can't answer, like high school phys-ed, like working at that donut shop, things i feel like i should be able to excel at since i can do these other supposedly important things, like school and books. but waitressing and schooling inhabit two different worlds of ability and i'll always be the fumbling waitress who cannot ever remember where the peach mint sangria is or how to void a credit card.

so i suppose i was born a little malevolved, little baby brain thinking oh well okay i'm fed and happy and warm and not in the rain or in the stomachs of terrestrial superfauna so maybe i can just disregard all of those necessary things, things like attention, memory, sight, acting without thinking, running, a grasp of numbers and distances and time and an ability to devalue lacy silly things like emotion and big Cosmic Crisis in order to function as a cog, a useful gear, because things still need working to produce the fantastic world i was born into and i haven't quite yet earned my vittles to the extent where i could just sit and learn and worry and love and have the world trust that this was how i fit and work into the gears of the machine of the earth running from approximately 1989 until 2079 A.D.

No,
I need to learn some real earth skills. and i can cook and clean and sew with the best of them, i can grow food on the little pots of dirt i own since i don't have any claim to dirt on the ground. i have some post-apocalypse end time skills.

but i could never be the best waitress, i'll always be silly and ridiculous to the good ones i'm sure. any register job i've ever held has concluded with my boss thinking that i'm an idiot, and they ask the grades i earn concernedly.

so i'm glad i spent the summer as a waitress feeling incompetent but the sort of incompetent you know is internal and unchangeable,
but damn it feels so good to be back in little rooms with big books silenced by the total concentration and love for what you are thinking about and knowing that this, maybe, is the part of you and life and skill that you are able to become better at.

it feels a little too cozy but i'm okay with that for now.
there are things i'd rather be
and i could never deny my admiration for the incredible people i worked with, so high functioning, how does a person even become that perfectly sensible, perfectly working. i want to be that serious, i wish i wasn't embarrassed by my silliness, my impractical and unnecessary skills and loves. i wish i didn't feel the guilt that makes me call them impractical and unnecessary and silly, and i wish i knew if that guilt came from me or from the world i've grown up in and known.

someday maybe i'll smash all i've learned and all i've thought and amassed and combed through into a large level brick and something can actually sit on it, be elevated by it, because if i don't do something concrete before i die it'll just kill me.

I'M IN MY NEW DECADE NOW. let's get going elise.

small red woman walking away

madaket, nantucket MA july 2009



summer is slowly closing and i don't know how i feel about it, like any other year



edit: but i definitely feel about it

this cold front is so welcome so loved

matthew - smith's point nantucket MA 7/09

YES

self @ moonrise madaket MA 7/09





I am in love with my EveryDay
And it is all the romance i will
ever
need

new: homecoming everywhere

madaket, nantucket MA july 2009



rose leaves ohio tonight
rose arrives in manhattan in the morning
we'll eat breakfast and smile
bake bread for the evening
toothy grin like the friends we stayed
and stay up late
and get up early
amen

climbing out the weekend

madaket, nantucket mass. july 2009

hope as emergency prayer

rachel on smith's point, nantucket MA july 2009



i woke up this morning valuing my life. as i really always should. Because Damn the world is a dangerous place and we get so dangerous to each other

there's sand on you let me get it

madaket, nantucket MA july 2009


so i'm back from my one month leave which was so much quieter and so much more exciting than the new york city
things are loud and slow now
things are manhattan now
eighty degrees and the hot sun air puts me to sleep but i'm rested
i'll get back to the rhythm i promise.

1916

matthew, nantucket massachusetts. june 2008


how has it already been a whole year since this exact moment

the world outside new york city, here i come

funeral bouquet

nantucket, massachusetts. july 2008




two girls from faraway states descended on us like a blessing from God and now one of them is sleeping on our couch. the two girls i've been missing most lately falling from their coach buses as if it was unimportant, as if it didn't make my summer

oh you two, the rain today was so good because of you

a certain street in another state

nantucket, massachusetts. june 2008






i'll never be able to escape being from massachusetts. i was born there and began these last two decades there. i began there.



i will be a shrine to what i love.



on my street in manhattan there are leaves, the same exact leaves as in town on nantucket and when it's just sunny and still enough it becomes so fragrant exactly like the last twenty summers of my life

i'm getting a bit homesick and it makes me so happy
that i have a home

bicycle love

nantucket, massachusetts june 2008.




i've got me a bicycle crush and it's got me giddy

a good place's love

self, madaket, nantucket. july 2006.




old halcyon days hurt like healed bones, telling the weather.

memory happiness lingers around in the people with the same skeletons still in my life
their new faces speak the old life-saving words in times when i don't need saving, when i can just smile and know that they would
and i can thank them before anything happens at all