It probably is a fabric, and if it is it's a fabric that folds and flows in unknowable ways.
I live not only in a College Town but in the same college town where I myself went to college, a town where life flows along easily enough and it's easy enough to make a life outside the college world I might have thought was the only one but where
there are moments, times and places, where the fabric of the space-time continuum is folded, thickly, and pinned.
It's graduation day.
*
I woke up two years ago on this day (not this date but this day) to a surprise early-morning thunderstorm and the feeling that the core of my life had fallen away, dropped through something like a peg through a too-wide space.
Of course now I am fully aware that that was not true, but it's not too hard to feel sorry for yourself when it's your graduation day and the Actual Literal President of the United States is your graduation speaker and he is telling you that he is filled with hope and expectation for you on this, your graduation day!
but you are focused on nothing but making sure your alarm clock is set each night and your door is locked, focused on these things to the roaring exclusion of everything else.
No matter how many times I checked I could never be sure that the alarm clock would not un-set itself in the night, and that's who I was when I graduated from college -- a 22-year-old person who could not trust her own perception that yes, the door is locked, I know because I locked it myself.
*
If it is a fabric it is obviously quite an intricate print.
And where it is folded and pinned around a day like today, obviously it feels a little piercing (ha, ha) but I think instead of seeing it that way I will try to see moments like this as a place where things are firmly anchored.
I used to be that way but now I am this way.
It never has to be graduation day again.
*
The song: Stevie Nicks and Don Henley, "Leather and Lace"; 1982
Yrs,
AW
