In My Grown-up Life

I wrote a poem once entitled my grown-up life. It was intended to be tongue in cheek—at 24, I was pretty sure I was already a grown-up. It spoke of returning to the halls of my alma mater ten years later, my hair speckled with grey. In my grown-up life I will have a fig tree, it began. I heard children's feet on hardwood, smelled coffee and last night's dinner in the kitchen. I'm guessing there was an artist's studio out back and dried paint in the creases of my knuckles, but I can't recall the details now.

It was the fall after the summer I wore polo shirts and gold hoop earrings ironically, the summer I laughed and wandered and wondered with an eclectic crew of fiercely tight-knit friends who worked at coffee shops and bars, the summer we sat on stoops and porches and drank brown-bag shrouded cans of cheap beer through straws, the summer I discovered the swifts.

It was the fall after the summer after the end of my first great love.

A classmate, an older man, came up to me after I read the poem for the class and said I hope you get to have that life. I was taken aback and then immediately dismissed him in my head. This was before I considered that I might not, before it seemed possible that that future life might not be mine. It was a matter of when, not if. I had suspended it, put it on hold, but it was still coming. It still belonged to me.

A few years later, driving to school, I burst into tears at the realization that this was, in fact, the life I had imagined for myself, it was just a different imagining from a different time. (There had been a brief phase in my early teens where I was sure I'd live in a modern house in the countryside. There would be snow in the winter, parching sun in the summer, and giant picture windows. I was to be a swimming coach. I'm pretty sure this version of my future life was set somewhere in Eastern Washington.) The one I was living as I drove over the Sellwood Bridge in tears, this was the life that unfurled from the seed of my lifelove of art. There was paint in the creases of my knuckles, and a palpable aching loneliness strung from the sky. I was fiercely independent, wildly in love with myth and metaphor, the poetry of turn of phrase or changing light. I wore high heels often and lived by the covenant of apocalyptic hilarity.

The ten fabled years of the poem have come and gone, and how many lives have come and gone with them? There is no fig tree, no backyard studio. Instead there is the podium from which I lecture, charcoal ground into my skin, curious and excited students, the drive through the hills to the campus out west of the city, my basement studio, this crazy wild chosen family of friends, my heart breaking and opening more and more deeply with each passing year.

There are bits and pieces of the different lives I imagined, there are slicing shards I never would have dreamed, and there are the threads that diligently and inelegantly weave them all together.

This is a patchwork life; this is my patchwork life.

It is here, and it is still coming, and it belongs to me.