J O R D A N R E M I N D E D M E

Not For Mary Pollitz

By: Ashlyn Ervin

I can recall times when Mary Pollitz would say we were not friends and mean that she loved me. I guess two years still isn’t enough time or her to verbalize it, though—which only makes her more of an incredible person. There are things better than “I love you,” those things are what hold up these ancient buildings called MSA and these students called artists (or maybe visa versa) these things that can be summed up in hundreds of words that mean “I love you”, but aren’t.

On the last coffee house I bowed to Dr. Lebow. I sat between Mary and Kristi and read beatnik poetry, replacing every profanity I could never say in front of Dr. Lebow with “Cheesepoo” a more appropriate word. On that night I write this. A response to a book I won as a door prize, called Warriors—which I bequeathed upon Coffee, my cat-pack that Amelia made me. And everyone begged him to read a story, and I said that he would write one for next time, only to realize there wouldn’t be one.

I find the fact that I have witnessed the beginning middle (and my end) of literary chapters to be amazing. I met the epilogue (or I guess, to someone else, they might be the prologue) I called them “fetuses”, but meant “incredible”, “lucky”, and I guess, even “love.”

I wrote the fragments of this little ramble in a notebook I misplaced, this notebook held a poem (also buried in old edits and worksheets from Owens—insert appropriate amount of time for applause—old story bits I’d rather stay lost) this poem was a love poem—though I’m sure Mary will argue it was not even a poem (in fact she stated on the poem that it was not a poem) simply a couple of lines about toast, and us not being friends.

It’s only now that there are three weeks of school left that I think about last year and wonder where that excitement went. We get so tired so quickly, and now I wish I had slept, dreamed, written, cried, anything but let the days one by one line up behind me, I sit now with my back against them. Leaned up in front of them like a tired book on a bookend, I relish in feeling them brush against me because today I am sad that they’re gone.

But that’s not who you look at me as, that’s not the face you see in emails, counting down, cheering up people that would rather be home, the very place they left to be here. I wonder if they feel like I do. I’m sure they do. And that, that there, the lingering unknown feeling in the back of your throat when you look up and think that you missed something, when some how the old man with no teeth in front of you is beautiful, when your senior year is something you’re clinging to instead of throwing at the wall like splatter paint, that is love.

And I wonder if that old man thought he would be old. I’m sure it never crossed his wrinkled mind. And I think maybe he was just a book, resting on a beside table. A bookmark in the middle, promised to return—a calendar with one date circled in red, that made all the others look naked. And what was in those days?

I threw fluorescent balloons of water at people, I filled a room with famous models made of paper, I wrote for me and my family and MSA and my great-grandmother and your great-grandmother, I did not graduate every day. So today I think, there is nothing about that day worth waiting for. It is the same as every other day. It is a walk, from one place to another, granted with a silly hat, but still, a walk nonetheless, and me feeling that now, after hundreds of days of waiting. Me finally not minding that everyone sings, not vocals, or talented songbirds, everyone sings, that feeling of nonchalant passiveness, even that is love.

At a loss for words I read over and over the things Mary had to say to me, months after the not friends poem, and here in this book I won at coffee house she says, “I don’t know what, but you are my favorite something,” and after it all, she writes, “If I could say it, I would.” Now I can’t bring myself to tell her she has, that everyone has, the vocals at the bell tower, the visuals in the hall ways, the theaters nowhere because they are the at rehearsal, the literaries, the laptops with folders full of possible poems and first drafts, the Dr. Lebow, all of it that is love. I’m refusing to say good-bye, but “I love you” may slide off my tongue before I know it’s falling. But I hope you catch it, and that you can see it, when you look back, not just in me, but in the cracks of the floors in JI, in the story books that we made for ourselves, in the things we’ve done not what we’ve said, in the days we’ve lived, not the ones we’ve waited for.