I enjoyed this class a lot! I'm averse to revision (lol) so these are still pretty raw but I did edit and rearrange a bit. I love writing but have very little discipline when it comes to actually doing it so this class helped me get into a little bit of a routine.

Day 1: Jan. 25

Today I noticed, as I stood in the middle of the bone-dry riverbed, how if the earth was a brain, rivers would be its neural pathways, and how strong the memory of water is, even when it hasn’t made an appearance in years. The bed remains made for it, the sun-bleached pebbles an anxious mother eternally ready for a houseguest. After scrambling on larger rocks down into the riverbed, I looked up and down it, my head on a swivel like an owl. I laid down on a flat boulder in the middle of it, a boulder that would have been submerged if everything was working as it should. I tossed my backpack to the side and read my book for a few hours, feigning nonchalance. When I closed my eyes, a cascade of long-overdue water crashed into me, obliterating my façade and tearing me away.

I, like the riverbed, have a memory of water so strong it almost killed me (both the memory and the water). When hands and arms rescued me from the flood and thrust me up into the air, I couldn’t speak. The saltwater had filled my throat and lungs. I still can’t speak. I cough and taste salt.

Day 2: Jan. 26

Today I noticed the turtles on the edges of the river, the onlookers to our kayak parade. There were so many of them, materializing around every bend and in every shadow made by an overarching tree. They congregated on large flat rocks sunning themselves with a remarkable stone-faced stillness. Petrified, neck stretched toward the sun, eyes closed. Stoic, in a word. Turtles are cold-blooded, my friend told me. They are doing this to survive. Every single rock we saw looked like it was at absolute maximum turtle capacity, the turtles pressed up against each other so tightly none of the rocks were visible and they were just masses of turtles rising up out of the river and into the gaze of the sun.

But there were turtles in the water too. Swimming, ostensibly, although they didn’t seem very good at it. They floated and glided and sliced the water slowly with their presence, not going any direction. Poking their little amphibian heads out of the water like miniature periscopes before retreating. As I paddled above them, I worried about the ones in the water needlessly. Would their blood run too cold until they floated belly up like a kid’s pet store goldfish until they pockmarked the river’s surface with death? How would the ones on the rocks carve out space for them where there seemed to be none? It was so stupid. These things have happened forever and will keep happening and there will always be enough rocks and there will always be enough room.

Day 3: Jan. 27

Today I noticed how cold it is in our house. We haven’t figured out the thermostat yet and I woke up with chattering teeth even though the sun shone outside. Elsie and I took a walk down to the river again and stumbled upon a little spring blocked off by a stone wall of a few feet and then a fence on top of that. The sign on the fence screamed “Alert! Alert! Danger! There are two species of salamander that live here and are super endangered. They live in this spring and only this tiny spring. Don’t enter this special salamander zone or the federal government will hang you in the town square. Also, these salamanders are about four inches long and blind and deaf.”

What a shitty existence, I thought, to be an endangered tiny blind deaf salamander. But also, how freeing. I am always looking for an out.

We came home and made dinner. I accidentally cut my thumb instead of a Brussel sprout with a serrated knife. The cut was bad by my standards, which is to say not bad at all. Nonetheless, it was bleeding, and as I was complaining in the kitchen, I heard a loud meowing: the stray cat had returned. I let him into the screened-in porch (we are trying not to let him in the actual house but who knows how long that will last) and sat with him out there. I’m truly obsessed with the screened-in porch, it’s so Southern and therefore foreign to me.

The cat is all black and I think he’s magic. Last night on the screened-in porch, he walked right up to the door that leads inside the actual house and sat down in front of it, and it just happened to pop open right then with no one touching it. He streaked inside and we chased him around for a bit until we were able to get him back outside.

Tonight I held my bleeding thumb wrapped in a paper towel out to him. He came forward and gave it a look before slinking away disinterested, back out into the yard. I couldn’t blame him for wanting an out.

Day 4: Jan. 31

Today I noticed how in Mad Men everyone is sad and depressed and repressed and anxious and paranoid because they can’t talk to each other but I talk a lot and I am still all of those things and now everyone talks about all of those things and it’s cool to some degree to be all of those things and we are no more happy than they were in the 1950s and how are we supposed to get any happier if the world gets worse and worse and after all this evolution we built ourselves a little room of choice paralysis and locked ourselves in it and called in the Land of Opportunity.

Today I learned that there is a special enzyme in buffalo saliva that regenerates it and helps it grow back faster, better, stronger even as the buffalo destroy it in the name of consumption. The buffalo say thank you and unwittingly give a consolation prize. We should give ourselves one for this self-perpetuating mess.

And today I had an interview and was barely nervous because I got the sense that they needed me more than I needed them. I think I have the job. But it will give me less time to clean up the mess.

And yesterday when I was really drunk with friends, I love dearly I just wanted to be alone with my book.

The cat hasn’t come back in two days. I’m not worried because I feel like he can take care of himself. But still.

Day 5: Feb 2

Today I noticed that it all seemed to be happening according to some impossible rhythm: the birds’ dancing, that is. As we stood in the still-dry riverbed a little farther upstream than the other day, we were assaulted by the almost mechanical hum of thrashing wings. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of birds about the size of my fist swarmed us. They looked like robinsThey flapped, glided and dove in a somewhat figure eight pattern between four junipers that reached out over the ghost river, their branches almost kissing in the center. Almost forming a wedding trellis. Someone should be getting married here, on the limestone pebbles.

We craned our necks every which way to watch the flying spectacle, nearly giving ourselves whiplash when they sped directly overhead and then behind us. This is my Groundhog Day, I thought. This is spring, the birds and their rain dance, the doves released at the juniper wedding. The stream will fill now. I promise. I do.

Day 6: Feb. 6

Today I noticed the silence that consumes everything when I turn on my noise-canceling headphones. The silence kicks in like a presence instead of an absence, rising like a wave to drown out all noise. It’s a deep inhalation, a flood of absence as they power on, and then, finally, peace. So this is what it feels like, to make nothingness palpable, to cast off distractions, to repent. The silence is so all-encompassing I can hear the seashell sounds of my ears. The hum of the fridge is gone, the traffic evaporates, my eyes whip open and it’s just me, alone, on the surface of Mars moving at a syrupy pace. Consensually deaf. God, I love the way the silence floods in and obliterates everything. I crave it, the heavy blanket muffling a scream like a heavy footstep on an unsuspecting throat. A curfew going into effect. A moratorium. A depression.

Day 7: Feb. 7

Today I noticed my Advil kick in like my noise-canceling headphones. Like a CPR-given breath flooding a collapsed lung consciousness. I had never been able to pinpoint the exact moment of the medicine’s effect being felt before, but today it was so sudden, an exhale.

Sometimes the things I write are bad, but I would like to think they are at least a little better than the contents of ***** *******’s notebook. I’ve always hated him. He threatens me with a bad time, standing there, making me look like a fool. I hated that he had been with ***, and I hated *** for having been with him. Mostly, I hated the way he was allowed to act arrogant, rude, unconcerned with the opinions of others. And he had the confidence to act this way because his friends would love him anyway. I hated him so much for having this freedom and social ease I wanted so desperately and using this freedom to be shitty. I couldn’t have slipped up at all, much less acted horrible all the time. Maybe security and friendship and confidence and stability are the great enablers of the world, the real social missteps. Do other people take advantage of those things? Or was he just terrible?

Day 8: Feb. 9

Today I noticed how not fun thrifting was. It made me depressed: the sheer amount of clothes, the screaming toddler, the blank faces of the old ladies thumbing through the mass. Poverty is appalling and so is excess; I’m probably not in a position to condemn any place where the two can converge and one can serve the other. But it seems like we are all just begging for scraps. I don’t even want anything anyway. Actually, that’s a lie. I want so many things I can’t even talk about it. But I know the solace is in the wanting and not the having. It’s part of my obstinate unwillingness to give up on myself and my little project of a life, a project I hate having to work on but can’t put down. If I only had the right tools, I could create a life I enjoy living. But the having is so underwhelming and overwhelming all at once that it makes me feel disgusted by my self-fashioned double-edged sword of greed and ungratefulness.

Day 9: Feb. 11

Today I noticed that I feel mandated to say everything when I say anything, and in between all the disclaimers and digressions and counterarguments, the point I am trying to make is suffocated. I think one of my favorite pieces of writing advice was given to me by a professor in my first year at college. That an interesting paper starts with an interesting thesis, and the thesis should be something inflammatory, something on the fringes, something that can and should be contested. I want to talk about the pin drops on my consciousness that exist so far from the center that navigation toward them is tricky and articulating them is a celebration worth writing about. I want the black hole weight of these things to bend the scales toward themselves. All this for an article in a student newspaper. All this before I say anything.

Day 10: Feb. 11

Today I noticed how bad I am at reading out loud. I end up sounding choked up no matter the emotional content of whatever I’m reading and whoever I’m reading it to. Something to do with a failure of breath control. I gasp awkwardly in an attempt to posture ease, even in the lowest of stakes.

I find so much pleasure in being the necessary in-between, the translator of a language all parties already speak. I relish being the middleman with the scoop, knowledge delivered far and wide. Education, academia, journalism, criticism. How we have devised countless ways to make ourselves useful.

But even though I’m bad at it I try to push through and give myself up to the ever-present spread, being the one who brings (like the one who knocks, but less violent). Have you seen this yet?

Mirabella Miller

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