Two weeks later you take an overly long afternoon nap. You don’t feel ill, but you don’t feel well, and you have no name for this odd, uncomfortable unwellness, for a second you think you might be with child, but you have been cautious about that, marking your calendar diligently and counting the days, so that surely can’t be it, and it passes, and you are terribly relieved when it does.
— This is quite accurate, so far.
— I do have the letters you sent to Grandma from then.
— Oh! I didn’t know that. I’d like to read those. But, wait, I wouldn’t have written to Mother about anything like that last thing.
— I know.
Matters
Junior year, one Saturday night in your dorm room at GW, it seems like a good idea to drink a six-pack or two of beer because you have a paper due for rhetoric class, and halfway through the semester you still don’t fully understand what the word “rhetoric” means, much less how to write a paper on it. What does “rhetoric” mean? you ask your roommate. Kimmie is practically a hippie compared to you, wears peasant blouses and patched dungarees, ends a lot of sentences with the word “man.” Is that a rhetorical question? she asks, laughing a bit more than is warranted, handing over a small ceramic pipe. No, you say, it’s not, I don’t think I get it. It just basically means persuasion, she says. You exhale a lungful of smoke, say Huh. I thought it was more, like, philosophical than that. It could be, she says, but in itself it just means how you get your point across. You’ve now got a buzz on that prevents a real understanding of what “in itself” means here. In itself, you say out loud, and then it starts to ring around in your head, with added visuals, you picture same things in same things, books inside of books, pens inside of pens, pipes inside of pipes inside of pipes, infinite same things in infinite same things. Whoa, you say, a minute later or three hours later, one of those; neither of you has even a remotely accurate perception of time right now, and if you can’t understand the concept of rhetoric you definitely can’t understand the concept of time. In itself. What does that even mean? Okay, look, Kimmie says. What is your topic? Rhetoric. No, your paper topic. What are you going to write about? I don’t know! Well what does it say on the syllabus? Syllabus? Yeah, the syllabus, that piece of paper they give you with due dates? I don’t know if I still have that. It usually helps to have that. Syllabus. That’s a weird word. Syllabus. Sillibus. Sllbs. That’s a weird word, right? In your rhetoric notebook, folded among the notes you took in class that you can’t read because of your atrocious handwriting, you discover the document. Kimmie takes it, runs her finger down it to find Monday’s due date. Okay, easy-peasy. You get to pick your own topic. Basically all you have to do is make a statement about something that matters to you, and then argue a case that it’s true. Something that matters to me? Yeah, something that matters to you. Uch, you say out loud. You have no idea what matters to you, especially not after nine beers and three hits off Kimmie’s pipe, which you now notice is shaped like a nude man with a tiny bowl acting as his erect penis. Whoa.
Kimmie begs you to go out with her after your pre-buzz is fully on, one more hit before she goes, paired with another room-temperature beer that hasn’t had time to chill in the mini-fridge. You’re not going to get any work done now, she says. It’s ten o’clock already. You say I have to fry. Kimmie falls over laughing. You said you have to fry! No I didn’t, I said “try”! Whatever, are you coming, or not? No, I have to figure out what matters to me.
Your roommate exits laughing; you weren’t meaning to be funny. You honestly do not know what matters to you. Being drunk and stoned at the moment doesn’t help, but stone-cold sober the question would be no less existential. You climb up to your bed, the top bunk, with your notebook and a pen. You open the notebook to a blank page, write “What Matters to Me” across the top, with a number one below it on the left-hand side of the page. Nothing comes to mind, so you write a two below the one, then a three below that. You could just put the stupid pen down on the paper and scribble, maybe it would come to you that way, but it seems too important to just write any old thing down, “peace on earth” or whatever. Stuff like that matters to everyone, doesn’t it? What matters to you? Right now you can’t even remember what interests you. You write down “Matter,” next to the first number. Now you’re on to something. Next to number two you write “What is matter?” Then you cross that out. “What is the matter?” That’s not right either. What the fuck does matter to you? You care about things. You want the people in your life to be well and happy. You’ve always liked writing, but does that matter? Could that be a thing that matters? You know that whatever matters to your mom, you don’t want to matter to you — heaven forbid. That made sense when you thought it a second ago. Oh yeah, right, because you’d be engaged right now if that were the case; forget that there are no viable candidates just yet, at least you have the good sense to know that if you can’t even figure out what matters to you, even the best candidate would end in disaster. Then again, you don’t want to do the opposite of what your mom did either, because she always told you she did the opposite of what her parents did. If you do the opposite of the opposite, is that the same as doing the same? You could just relax, maybe experiment a little. But that’s not really your thing, not the experimenting, definitely not the relaxing. You want a boyfriend; you sometimes think a boyfriend would be not so much what mattered to you most, but the thing that would cease your cosmic loneliness long enough for you to figure out what mattered to you most — because the truth is, boys do take up a lot of space in your head, even if it is usually just one at a time.
Another beer will probably help. You climb down off the bunk; your foot gets stuck between the bars toward the bottom. You fall backward — no big — you get up, grab a beer, but suddenly popping open a beer is physically demanding, your right hand doesn’t have the strength to pop the tab and your left hand is made of mush, and the beer drops to the floor and spills all over the shaggy throw rug. You try to pick up the can to salvage some of it, but it falls right out of your mush hand as soon as you lift it, which is a bummer, because when you go to the fridge to get another, you discover that that was the last one, and you don’t have it in you to go get money from the bank, which isn’t open anyway. You go pee, come back with the crusty rinse cup from the sink, try to push the spilled beer out of the rug into the cup with the side of your hand; this results in nothing more than some slightly wet fuzz on the lip of the cup, and you wonder how one would wring out the rug while it’s still on the floor. You put the cup upside down on top of the rug, pinch at the rug fibers with your fingers in the hopes of flipping the cup quickly with the liquid still in it, this method also unsuccessful. Somehow you climb back up to the top bunk (tomorrow you won’t remember this part), look at what you wrote, scribble something on it, pass out, wake up with the notebook in front of you, not realizing you’d even passed out, scribble a few more words, pass out again, scribble some more.