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It’s no longer June 2nd, or 3rd. It’s the 9th, and I went to my college orientation over the weekend. I don’t know how to feel about it. I don’t know how to talk about it without potentially becoming the sky. Today, I didn’t do much in school. A security guard yelled at me because he didn’t think I was a senior when I came back from getting Haley a drink from her favorite smoothie place. He said I didn’t stop when I left to give him my name and if I had free that period. I had never been asked to stop before, and I don’t believe he believed a single word of what I said to him, even though I was telling the complete and honest truth. I felt very small, even smaller than I am. Maybe I’m not a senior. Maybe I’m still fourteen years old. Maybe the world is right and my driver’s license is wrong. Maybe I’m wrong all over. I start to think about those teenagers wanting to die.

It’s raining now and I’m in my room. I have the varsity dinner tonight and I don’t want to go, but I promised coach that I would be there. The sun shines and it’s raining and I hear birds. The rain feels like flowers today. Flower petals, soft and damp and small. And bruised by the maybes.

sometimes,
in the worst of times,
I feel the heart-sick
sinking in my whole
self.
not just in my
chest, nor my
head, nor my
fingertips,
which are by far
the most sensitive--
for I am an artist.
I feel the weight
of what you carry
in my little artist-hands,
like a book.
too many pages
ripped out--
torn edges,
bent corners,
like bruised
flower petals.

I throw the pen at my desk after pushing the french exam back into my bookcase. I breathe.
I completed the three day fast, by the way. My head hurt and my legs sort of shook and my whole body was angry at me, but I stuck my tongue out at it and felt accomplished. I don’t get trophies for that, though.
Mr. Dulin was out today, sick, and I wished he wouldn’t have gotten sick because today was my last day in class. Tomorrow my grade is participating in something called Challenge Day, and Thursday we receive our yearbooks and leave at 10:42 in the morning. That will be my last day of high school. Ever. I don’t want to think about that.
Spring seeps in through the screen in the open window and sinks into the pillows and blankets and the hard wood floor. Spring is bitter-sweet, but today it’s mostly sweet.
I left school early Thursday afternoon last week; my mom and I drove up to my grandparents farm to spend Friday there before driving to orientation on Saturday. It was a good drive. Friday, we bought my grandmother a rosebush, drove and saw the Amish, hiked around the farm, went out in a rowboat on the pond, and watched an old show from 1947 about some doctor guy who cheated on his wife, faked his death by sending his dead patient over a cliff in a burning car wearing his wedding ring, and then ran away to New York City to be with his girlfriend. I forget how it ends.
That evening my mom and I sat down at the edge of the garden next to where we planted the rosebush, and looked over the field of growing hay. On the far end of the field flows the Champlain Canal. It was just around eight o’clock that it happened. We saw a mist begin to creep across the field. We sat and watched in awe as it swelled and grew into an incredible cloud of fog that pushed over the field. It was a scene out of a movie, I swear on the life of the Orange I expected dragons to fly out of it, or an army of knights or guerrilla warfare soldiers or native americans with their feather-adorned horses or a pack of glow-eyed wolves to charge from it. We walked down the path to the right, toward it, and I ran into it, feeling it surround me and feeling like I had stepped into magic itself. I ran through the field, through the mist, wanting to get lost in it, wanting to find something in it, wanting to show all those teenagers who want to die what magic there is in the world, and I spun and ran and looked and soaked the fog into my eyes and hair and skin and soul. I was the mist, there in my adventure boots and oversized sweatshirt and cargo shorts, I was fog, dissipating into the earth and the trees and the life of the growing hay.

in the
mist,
no one can
see you.
no one can
touch you.
you are the
earth, the
life, the
ever-drowning
teenage
trench, the perfect
sky full of
dreams that shoots the
stars, and sends them
crashing.

I had taken the pen from my boot and written onto my arm. It’s washed away now, for the most part. The remaining ink resembles the words “see,” “you,” “dream,” and “crashing.” I try not to think about it. I don’t want to think about Eric from orientation, or the friend that has stopped talking to me because he thinks I can’t help him, or my other dear friend who I haven’t heard from who is in the hospital because she wants to die too often, or the blond with tattoos who ran his hand through his hair and spoke of smoking or being alone. I don’t want to become the sky. I don’t want to die.