Cold, Empty College

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I remember a poet wrote, 'I put my love on like a shirt, my arms pushing through sleeves, hands slipping out cuffs. I put my love on like a shirt.'

I read this in college, a book of poems for an English assignment, presented artistically in Art College. We were free to choose a final paper subject for which I chose ravens. I read and wrote, fascinated and surprised, bird secrets unraveled, brand new information linking to my rich understanding of natural history. From a childhood at the beach, I knew where Kingfishers sat on wires by Highway One, scanning the lagoon shallows, grey blue. Small with strong, pointed beak, prepared to spear an evening meal.

Later, an adult, I tossed that raven paper along with all creative endeavors of the time. First I sliced and burned college canvases of ironic wide-eyed empty faces and romantic spirits living in acrylic bubbles. Canvases transformed from young pride to poison by an admiring artist bastard father. I cleaned that era to sparkling emptiness as if the darkness could be neatened.

Father and Mother delivered my student self to college. Leaving me to fearful newness. I craved freedom, I saw art becoming mine, not just his, not just the family’s. Now my perceived future included me.

The expected excitement turned suddenly. That one year of Art College (now called University, I wonder why) was all I could do. Scared to death by each purchase of brush, pencil, jar of oil, I flopped like a caught fish on cement steps trod by art students from important generations. What daring to think I belonged. By way of the dorm room door I entered into dark pain, hollow, floating, brittle. My roommate left with her older lover, leaving her empty bed for curious parents. Loneliness and an aching heart tore me out of my shivering self.

My own childish love was gone to sea by way of the Navy, by way of opiates. How stupidly I waited loyally. Suffering love was the only sort familiar to me; loving that hurt. I felt sudden death of young passion that had wrapped so closely I imagined I could button him up around me like skin. But what kind of love is a shirt, dead beaten linen, a plant that no longer draws moisture or minerals from field nor energy from the sun?

That deep night of college tipped me onto a black rock, like a maiden in myth, left with sea pounding around, long sleeved skin wrapped tightly against the bone. I kept myself in the wet cold, with only that skin-tight linen shirt, denial roughly clinging. A cold college coed died on her dorm room rock from silence and aloneness, a living hell now understood as chemical imbalance. Imbalance from DNA or soul I don't know. I just knew I couldn't pull enough oxygen from thin sea air. Oxygen, from roiling sea, was useful to gills only, a flooded cold breath. That first semester, a freezing storm blew long, with tide pulling life far away, good for oceanic fish but not far away enough for my release.
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