What I'm Doing Here

I've gotten three emails asking what I'm doing at Brown and one email asking if I'm really at Brown or just having some bizarre college flashback.

Here, I am going to school; Here, I am writing; Here, I am writing an essay about piling chickpeas too high on a plate and hotboxing cigarettes and what motherhood might mean and how I was thirty before I knew that apples have one hundred calories and how it never seemed there were any men in Mama Heaton's house, an essay about the Cult of Domesticity and Roseanne Barr and being scared of the bird and how in high school Brooke Gregory could burp the alphabet, an essay about love and what it feels like to wear love or carry love or be in love or sit near the shore of love and throw your feet into love or tie your hair back with love, an essay about suddenly remembering who you didn't want to be, remembering who you are, an essay that says nothing about staring out of windows though that is what I do all morning long; maybe I am writing more than one essay. Afternoons, I stir Benefiber into water in a little plastic cup with a spoon I carried all the way from Brooklyn; evenings, I go to lectures then put my legs up the wall and make up songs. Here, it is good. All good.

And that is what I'm doing.