Election Year (a poem)

I realize I am always measuring my life in some
nostalgic version of 

“this time last year." 

Saving chopstick wrappers 

and cards and pictures on my phone.

Trying to hold onto everything 

while I still can,

trying to salvage the unsalvagable.

Believing this moment is more 

than just simply a moment.

Thinking about all the 

cool and profound things I want to do

but never getting around to them.

They don’t make memories like this
anymore.

This will be a good month.

And this will be a good life.

May came with a blue-gray streak of 

storm threatening the tree-line,

announcing its arrival with the 

roll of thunder, darkening suburbia.

There’s something that’s always 

been bittersweet to me about this time of year.

Friends leaving, friends coming home,

Mother’s Day, flowers, 

something sleepy and fleeting.

Prom, parties, 

everything, futures, wide and bright.

May breeds a place, a time for roots, a dark dampened ground.

Looking out the window I thought about how the trees 

outside my Gov classroom have 

been there for the past

four years, too,

but unlike me, they’ll never leave.

A kind of grounded impermanence, 

a kind of stationary necessity.

We’ve been working so hard

for the day that 

we’ll get out of this place since

the day that we arrived

without noticing the trees 

or the coffee smell of the hallways.

A post-grad curse. 

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Maybe I’m wrong and 

you’re not all as sentimental as I am.

Soon the tassels will turn.

We’ll move on.

This won’t matter so much.

I know it’s supposed to be a happy ending,

but is any ending every really happy?

I’ll probably miss

this the suburban safe haven
where fights don’t break out on metros 

and there’s no symbolic city grime

or museums full of weirdos 

and the distance between me and home 

is only a couple of

tiny miles.

And I know I have to get out of this town,

but part of me--

the wimpy part--

wants everything to last forever.

But there’s the necessity to leave 

this little comfort zone.

To feel nothing during the metro fight 

and to walk through museums 

with people I hardly know.

Because I made it. We made it.

Of course,

like any ending, there are

friends I made too late,

people I wish I’d known longer,

things I wish had happened.

The destinations of yesterday 

lost and forgotten as

we beat on, 

seniors singing songs for tomorrow.

But we’re just so young,

there’s still so much time 

to celebrate birthdays 

and to make the world we want

out of ourselves.

At that, there’s still enough time

to tell all your friends 

that you love them

and there’s always going to be
enough time 

for one more song.

And so we hope for tomorrow

and lament the loss of 

those who won’t make it to then

and laugh our last laughs

and tell random people how in love we are 

and then forget about it the next day

and face the future with big, beating hearts

because we’re ready.

We stand here,
facing a world
of silver spoons and soap boxes,
and we're ready. 

“Stop waiting for the right time,”

I say to myself as the sky breaks open 

and the rain starts to come down in great chutes.

“It doesn’t exist.”

For now I’ll keep writing essays about everything bagels

and listening to storms passing quietly in the night.

I'll keep saving chopstick wrappers 

and feeling sentimental and I'll believe in 

my youthful invincibility,

because maybe my art won’t get me to Jupiter,

but my lust for life could get me 

pretty darn close.