Sticker Booklet

Strip sweat-soaked underwear 
      in the crowded bathroom
            and admire your dog-love bites in the mirror. 
Empty twenty mason jars
      of thick farm milk 
            in the tub, 
let the cream settle back on top. 
            The stove is one room over, 
      a gifted soup pot simmers 
fifteen-bean soup.
It's over-salted and that's more bliss.
Milk bubbles cluster your belly-rolls.
Decide the day is a stew,
and you are the floating mother. 

I heard a warning in the weeks leading up to graduation that the year after leaving college can be the most existentially challenging in a young adults life. And, I expected a similar dynamic, that college would become the “easy years” in my mind.

Instead, I’m faced with a harvest that is constant and a daily routine that borders on cushy.

That isn’t to say my new job isn’t challenging and NYSEG isn’t shitty, but… I have a bathtub of my own and a giant bag of epsom salts. I have yard-sale coverlet wide enough to cover both my lovers. My mother saved me a gaudy glass lamp to decorate my dresser with. I eat every time I am hungry: peanut butter, canned beans, hot garlicky greens.

I am not specially adept at practicing thankfulness, so I don’t think this intergenerational misunderstanding can be pinned on excessive contentment. If the present were so good because I’m skilled at seeing it that way, I would have experienced undergraduate as equally “good”.

Why was there not a better understanding from my elders how demoralizing the under-resourced over-worked college experience is? Why did I accept that experience as my baseline?

More to come.