Kiwi Alex Carrollâs flip flops on the stairs sound like those handclap toys you shake back and forth, a stick with two flapping hands, the shoes clap clap clapping too rhythmically, too intentionally, manically, like a wind-up monkey crashing its cymbals together - broken, on repeat.
    Alex, why do you run down the stairs in your flip flops like that every damn time, hopping and landing on each creaky step? I asked him earlier. His tight lips, which he sucks in when preparing to spit a condescending comment at me unfurled in a jokerâs grin.Â
    Because I like the echo, he said, and proceeded to dart up the wooden stairwell slapping his handclap shoes louder than usual. He assumes smoking one joint in the Queen street alley watching pompous New Zealand pigeons take their daily rest upon the neighborâs backyard drying lines means I will receive an âFâ in every class - total irresponsibility. In actuality, an âFâ is unfathomable to me. Professor Muller says poetry like paw-etry; her hybrid German-Kiwi accent colors every word. She quite liked my response to Poundâs poem âApril,â the âpale carnage beneath bright mistâ line arresting my attention. Praise, praise, well received work on paw-etry. But I have not done enough today.
    Here on the third floor in my âtowerâ bedroom of the flat I am a yellowed, laying lamb; a glassy film across my gaze, like cataracts, scrunched under thin sheets. Under disagreeable florescent lights in my temporary room I liken myself to that "pale carnage," mist descending quietly on my brow, lying in cold sheets while I whisper out loud to the old âmeâ before the devastating epiphany, who I am growing to miss so much, what is this new opaque white layer on my mirror, on everything? My pine scented candle has lost its crispness, the albatross on the New Zealand Birds guidebook seems to be missing its feathers; I sense a strange blithe approaching. The room is dulled because I am too still, and have been for too many days, and stillness is regression, stillness is unacceptable. I have accomplished nothing lately at the pace I mean to, I donât know why. Paralysis like this is new to me.Â
    But Alex delights in that maddening reverberation of the flip and flop, he stops to hear it, he owns it and heâs only going up and down one flight, going nowhere really, savoring it. And I am blinking through these cataract blotches, confused and lost because I have realized by now on this trip that I have only been a âhuman doingâ for years. And thatâs not right. But who am I without tangible proof of my âdoings,â when I am slow to create, slower to demonstrate, unable to show my best self? Then I am not âme,â says the unfinished quilt, lumped on the floor after I threw it at the wall. Soon I have to keep sewing it because I have been sitting for a few hours too long without anything - no coursework beckons me today. I canât sew, I can't sew, so I need to spend hours cursing my clumsy fingers until I prove I can suture whatever I want together.
    On last weekâs Greenstone hike the brush of tussocks on my ankle, like powdered sugar rubbing between my fingers, told me a secret of stillness that I am not yet willing to hear. I have to do. I have to do. Who I am is what I do, but Iâm never doing enough. Iâm sick of that now. For the tenth night I am alone, sinking into the paleness of the walls, wondering how to chip out a different bas-relief of âme.â
    Emily and I get the hell out of Dunedin, rainy âDunners.â It is winter in this hemisphere. We drive to her seasonal home in Wanaka, a tourist town in a mattress of mountains. Her mother is a chirpy melodic thing. The backyard trampoline is beaten into submission, too concave for my stiff vertebrae while I lounge on it. It is said that oneâs vertebrae extend overnight; we stand taller in the morning. At about eight in the morning now under the sun, I am no lengthier, not flexible. But Emilyâs strides are lengthy, landing only on tiptoe, somehow, flowing across the yard. She is on point at single moments, and hovers on the others. I admire her smooth gait on dainty feet. I wonder how that leisure feels; a gliding sail across clam water, soft windy kisses blowing her forward on the light hardwood inside. She moves, yet seems to idle in repose; she is a dreamy walker, hardly asleep. But Emily has never pranced in a pink walled studio. She just knows how to take her sweet time in every artful step traced upon floors she seems to turn into glass. Maybe I can curve with the trampoline missing too many springs.
    You know you donât have to talk so much to do so much for it to mean so much, Meredith, she says to me that day.
    I donât know how to stop trying, I say.
    I thought I missed summers in Eugene after slogging through back to back white winters, the price of studying in New Zealand. I am back, listening to Claire and the others watch an old VHS without really discerning shapes on the screen - I'm alone in a fog. Why VHS tapes are cool again, I don't know. Suddenly the air is too pregnant with water. The saggings and crevices in Claireâs mildew covered leather couch coalesce in a direction to me that shapes a crying eye. A steel ball squeezes down my intestines and I cannot breathe, or articulate speech, there is a veil between me and Claire and I am thinking I donât know whose hands I am attached to, this makes me nervous and I think I can respond to panic signals before it happens because Iâve had so many panics since New Zealand but the feet pedaling me away from that crying eye are unrecognizable and the disassociation reminds me that maybe Iâm not all better yet I am not better yet no I am not better yet am I?
From Long Island, Steve sent me a book, Wherever You Go, There You Are. I am falling in love with a man far away â just for now â who gave me that bit of truth, but I still couldnât be further away from myself. I reach out to him on the phone after scribbling I am me, and I am okay, on paper. Â
    I am a ravinâ raven tonight, Edgar Allen Poeâs raven to be precise. I am probably wearing the only literature-inspired costume in this Seattle warehouse exploding with a network of five thousand friends on Halloween weekend, because on ecstasy, a crowd is in the soft pink expanse of my wide open mouth and our laughs are sonorous enough to carve out the walls, no, blow them like a balloon. My feathers and wings and beak shine with glossy messy glue stains. Katie, who I set up beanie babies in rows with when we were five and who I have loved ever since, insatiably touches my blue stand-out feather on my neck. Everybody else kisses and strokes my feathers under purple toned lights and lime green music. Nobody knows I fucked up the feathers â I canât glue well, I canât measure accurately. Nobody knows and nobody cares. Iâm tearing my throat screaming tonight but itâs actually like swallowing warm honey, because I am not perfect, but the guy struggling to peek through his Spiderman mask doesnât scrutinize my patchy raven wings. I wipe sweat from my brow - the silly glue stains collected some new friendâs glitter. I am simply here, stamping on this concrete earth, respiring, perspiring. Dimitri Vegasâ âMammothâ galumphs like its name out the speakers and for a moment Iâm holding hands with âmeâ again.
    Youâre an imposter, then, if you arenât constantly proving you do what you do, you like what you like, you know what you know, and know it perfectly? Gailâs chair allows enough space so that we canât touch hands if we reached out. That must be a professional rule of practice. Sometimes I do want her to hold my hand, though.
    I am an imposter whenâŠIâm not a participant, somehow. I must always be participating by knowing enough, practicing enough, liking it enough, or else Iâm nothing. I am no one, not me, if I am doing nothing, I say.
    When are you doing enough?
    Iâm cutting onions in front of Evan, chewing on my fingernail worrying that I would embarrass myself by cutting them oddly or unevenly. Iâm berating myself now for the times I loaded the pan with botched peppers and onions in front of Sarah. But perhaps that fear could be suspended. So Iâm cutting them slowly and distracting myself thinking of the Gorillaz edition of MTV Cribz, with Murdoc pointing to a painting of him cutting onions and balling from the acidic fumes. Iâve stopped thinking. I sliced âem more evenly than ever before. Iâm not doing much, and this shouldnât even matter, but maybe it really does.
    Steve is a walking encyclopedia, but he wonât believe me when I tease him with that truth. Steve says to honor a place of not knowing, at any level or topic; be proud of the opportunity to learn, to be curious. Curiosity is participation in this world, this means to me. I am curious about his dimples and how he cocks his head while thinking. He imparts these sage words while folding laundry in near perfect order, I canât fold clothes like theyâre paper like that, and I am melting into his fresh marshmallow sheets. But that yellowed lamb isnât trapped in bed anymore, and she isnât stuck there alone anymore, and sheâs found a few new eyes to peek around the white fog, maybe. Steveâs sketching pencil lacks a built in eraser, so he tied a thin blue rubber band around its end instead. Smart. Steve and I are like a rubber band of a sort. We stretch across miles and snap together again when itâs time. New York will claim him again this summer. I am memorizing his scent and the vein tributaries on his right forearm and the placement of the mole on his eyebrow.
    Though Steve married a beautiful woman named Architecture, and is seeing his mentor Philip on the side, I believe his sincerity when he says, or writes to me, Thanks for being you. Maybe the disappearance into that white, panicked void and watching my life from a distance, muted for a while, is okay to have felt and still feel sometimes. And maybe Thanks for being you is enough to lift the glass pane between me and all thatâs there to sense and sit with in some moments.  It has been two years and I am thinking of those stupid handclap shoes, stopping every step. Maybe this is enough to know I have never been away from âme.â
