Year 26

You turned twenty-six in the shadow of an endless winter, walked down streets lined with snow and patched with sunlight passing through the wet and empty limbs of trees. You listened to an iPod while you walked. It’s amazing that you can walk through a busy street, walled in by brick buildings, and know nothing about the people you pass. It seems like perhaps God made a mistake with humanity, leaving so much between our minds. Perhaps that is why you will always miss the ocean because it managed to capture that distance, the unknown thoughts that pass between a brown haired woman pushing a stroller in the cold, and a young man walking down the street, shoulders hunched to shield his ears from the stiff breeze.
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You think of moving someplace new and starting your life over, in a new place that didn't already know it was ruined. You are secretly jealous of old time sailors who could just move to a new port.
This is what it means to be twenty six in Ann Arbor. It means that you walk the streets alone and listen to music that makes you dream of being miles and lives away from where you are. Those days you often stare at the sky through bare limbs and reflect on how meager your life is, how you don’t even notice the sky unless the harmonica is being played at just the right moment. You start to confuse this sadness with something else, with unbeing. You think that at twenty-six each person has been given a task in youth and that perhaps you have missed yours.


The best nights are spent with a bottle of red wine and good conversation while playing a game of spades. Some days you walk through the arboretum on winding paths in the understory of trees talking about skunk cabbage and prairie grass. These are also good days. Twenty six is like being unmoored or like being the Essex after the whale has left.
This is also a year that you learn to hate cars. Up until this point in your life cars have been a means of conveying you and some friends from one place to another. This year cars become the bane of your existence. You develop an intimate relationship with each of your vehicle’s problems. You talk to them. You start to understand why people name their cars or boats. You don’t understand why they are ever named anything but expletives. You pretty much switch out one car for the other on a bi-weekly basis, parking it at the mechanic’s shop just down the road. Mornings, the door of the Oldsmobile is often frozen shut and you have to heat water and pour it over the door to open it. On the coldest days, the water doesn’t quite work and immediately freezes at your feet as well.
This is the year that you stop working at the preschool because it is a terrible place to work. Toddlers are as bad as teenagers when served in bulk. You work at the University of Michigan in the office of graduate admissions for the MBA program. You fold and file, and file and fold and mail out packages and receive mail. This is the beginning of the rest of your life!! The rest of your life seems imminently depressing.
In the summer you leave behind the cold of Ann Arbor and head for Ocean City, MD. You share a house with S’s sister and her husband. You remember BBQing at the edge of the bay, watching lightning shows roil the dark water and the swifts that glided down like bullets from the eaves to snag abundant summer insects. You remember your fifth roommate Gary, a blow up doll that the two couples kept exchanging, the best of which was the morning that S was leaving for work only to see Gary in the driver’s seat, smiling his creepy smile.
You had forgotten until just now how fun that summer was, sharing meals and episodes of Arrested Development. You hardly remember that as being part of twenty-six. You got into the MFA program with this story, which to date is the only you’ve managed to get published. The cynic side of you wonders why you spent 48,000 dollars to write stories that you could have written anyway.

Pros-You have not started accruing massive graduate school debt

Cons-The angst. The wondering if you’ve done or are doing enough at the age of twenty-six, wondering if you’re on the right track.

Pros-Leaving twenty-six behind.

Elegy of a Silk Tree
The tree’s first limb is close enough for you to comfortably place your right foot upon it. The limb is bowed like the back of an old woman, like your grandmother, heading towards the dust. The trunk’s smoothness seems to invite you to climb more. Later in life, the sea passing through your open fingers, your open palms, will remind you of this trunk. From there, you use your left hand to pull yourself further up into the tree, leaning your torso into the trunk’s soft embrace, and grasping, with your right hand, a limb, slightly higher. Now you pull both of your feet up onto an extrusion, that must have born limbs once, but now has been worn away by the intrusions of children and bears only you. Your left hand goes blindly upward, trusting the memory of a thousand previous climbs and grabs the joint two limbs bent like an elbow. Your left hand flexes as your left foot climbs the trunk, leaving you almost parallel, until you lift yourself neatly, both feet resting on a colossal limb that can bear your weight, in the sort of way that only a miraculous young body can do, can take for granted, as if this youth is its right, not a privilege. From here, you reach both hands up, grab a branch at shoulder height and lift yourself up to a small cranny in the tree, between limbs, where your bottom fits perfectly. You always stop here, below the crown of the tree, below its long arching branches. You think that if you climbed higher that perhaps you could reach the sky. But it is a thing that is thought of and not done. It is enough to be here, timeless, in the arms of the silk tree, held steady.