I told her sometimes I feel like a princess trapped on a potato farm, and she told me to be patient. She told me I have a balsamic moon, and I imagined a bright sliver cupping a bubble of pungent vinegar. She said I’m an old soul, a black sheep, a late bloomer. But I feel like I’ve already bloomed and faded, like my springtime of achievements is behind me. I can’t imagine what will happen when I bloom for real.
She said she’d begun charting the speed of the moon, not just its phase, sign, and house. She said the moon at the time of my birth was moving supersonically fast. I said the doctor had had to catch me like a football. She said my progressed moon is moving slower now, still fast, fast for almost anyone else, but slow for me. Slow like dragging Saturn on a chain through the clumpy, clayey potato field that has become my metaphor for life in Ithaca.
My moon is soft like a croissant. Its flaky pastry tips curl like Cancer crab claws. My moon is self-pitying. My moon expects you to read my mind. My moon gets so choked up on emotions and vinegar it can’t speak. It can’t defend itself. It can’t tell the difference between what I should do and what I want to do.
She said this lifetime is about reclaiming my voice. She said it's okay to feel the emotions as long as I can express them politically. I said I used to shove people off stages so I could perform. I used to freestyle slam poetry with my eyes closed. I used to be loud and brassy and loved for it, and now I’m just insecure and crying all the time. I asked if I’m going backwards. She said you’re not going backwards, you’re going deeper.
I don’t want to blame Ithaca. I have a bad habit of blaming my problems on my city. But I can’t help feeling that in Santa Fe I was loved for who I was, whereas in Ithaca the most I can get is respect for what I do. And what I do is not what needs to be done. I do not pick potatoes. I do not operate heavy farm machinery. I do not roll dying sheep off their own poop onto a fresh bed of straw. I told my boyfriend I want his parents to respect me for who I am, and he said who I am doesn’t even register on their radar.
I have never felt such a frantic need to prove myself to others. Proving myself to myself was always good enough.
I look at my graduation pictures and think, What hope! What promise! I look at my bank account and think summa cum laude won’t buy the groceries.
She said I have a good heart. She said to remember that writing is my gift to the world.
She didn’t answer all my questions. There wasn’t enough time. She recorded our session and put the CD in an orange plastic sleeve. I hugged her and didn’t want to let go. Last time I was in her office, I was sixteen and going through a three-year breakup we called a relationship. She read me a picture book about a dinosaur named Edwina and I cried. She said I was the first in a long line of heartbreaks and I was okay with that. I was happy about it.
Now I’m so concerned about breaking hearts that my own is starting to crack.
All I think about is running away. Even in August, when everything seemed okay, I only wanted to turn into a coyote and disappear into a cornfield and have all my interpersonal doubts consumed by moonlight. Somewhere below the horizon, I feel the moon move a little bit faster.
