Words Reworked and Scraps from the Past

Ten years ago, I was two months into a business venture with my friend Megan. We opened a bakery in August of 2013, and until a few years ago, I fibbed a bit about how the bakery began. Lying to conceal shame creates its own shame, like how soaking a dirty shirt in Febreeze won’t make you believe yourself clean.

Megan and I would share the story of how we baked birthday cakes together for friends and how we play-dreamed of opening a bakery called Love Punch. But what I never divulged when telling the story was that one of the reasons I’d said “yes” when Megan called to ask if I wanted to open the bakery with her was because I’d received a letter of rejection in the mail the day before.

Months prior, I’d applied to the MFA in Writing program at our local university, and it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be accepted. If the Writing program had been a first date, then I was the person who planned their wedding after one kiss. But the Writing program fucked me without ever embracing me.

I can still feel that embarrassment at not being accepted, the way its mocking heat refluxed my throat. The feeling of being abruptly naked under the hot spot of a bare bedroom ceiling light. I folded up what I thought would be my future with the trifold letter, and its terrible secret truth that I was wholly unworthy of the written word, and put it away in a proverbial cupboard. For years, I couldn’t even speak it. It was easier to talk of the honesties of my body than the veracities of my lack of value.

So a few weeks ago, when Jim and I came across an old computer of mine while cleaning out the basement, I flinched a bit at the files I found. Documents from 2008, 2010, and 2012 kept popping up unexpectedly, like menopausal acne, but then I remembered how great it feels to pop a zit.

Per anyone else’s experience, not all my past pieces of writing were shit. If anything, they were unpolished and naïve, but so was I at that age. So it thrilled me to end when I came upon one of my favorite pieces ever.

A poem rewritten.

During the 3 months Megan’s brother, Jason, and I dated, we shared numerous words because we both wrote, tho only one of us considered ourselves a writer. In September of 2008, he wrote me a poem, and for his birthday (which happens to be today) that same year, I rearranged every word of his poem into a new piece and gave it back to him.

It’s curious to be so proud of reformulating the words of another, but the process took determination and creativity. It wasn’t a vapid metaphor of ingredients becoming a meal, or clothes becoming an outfit; it was the word-version of cutting up someone’s luminescent limbs and stitching them into a vaporous exhale of stars.

It was a much younger version of me sitting on a long flight from Seattle with a notebook and columns of his words in front of me. The sky passed and I forgot to look because I was too busy inventing; my eyes dry from the blast of nozzle-driven air that’s always located on a ceiling too high for me to reach.

After 15 years of a sometimes tumultuous friendship, the one thing Jason and I can always agree on, can always see eye to eye on, is words.

Untitled (but all You) – By Jason Thomas (2008)

Little woman saving the world,

You must be like the

Peppers you

Told me about.

Your eyes like the

Last vestiges of sunset

Sighing through a pine forest.

My hands smelled like

Your hair last night (did you know that?)

My bottom lip tasted

Like your mouth last night (did you know that?)

What small star fell?

Who are you?

Your voice, your laughter,

They sound like stars twinkling.

Are you my flame?  Are you fire?

I want to fly closer to you,

As fast as I can

But

Maybe, rather, I'll burn up if

I stay away too long.

Long visits, abrupt stares, and

An honesty, a frankness, that

Disarms me.

I feel naked before you and it

Makes me blush.

You own as a part of you what

Other people work for.

You have all the world fooled,

Miss Wade.

They think that you're five foot two.

I know that you're larger than life.

If all time were to end, I'd want

To remember your laughter

And

The things that make you laugh.

Park benches will forever be

Our archipelago:

Harbours of safety and

Dangerous influences of

Native impulses.

You, Reworked - by Trilety Wade (2008)

I told all sunset about you,

Your pine eyes, fire mouth, flame hands.

I smelled your impulses;

They like that.

Tasted your blush;

Like that?

Closer than,

Larger if.

Your night stares, like want, last forever.

Last long

Last long

Saving time like a sound

You fly me fast as laughter up and away.

Fell to safety,

your bottom lip.

I miss the stars as you laugh -

I’d wade through fooled forest,

dangerous night too,

to feel part of you.

a Hair,

that Voice

That I know,

You’re my archipelago.

I can be a woman before you, native.

You know me naked, sighing, twinkling.

You did that.

You’re an end to the other influences.

Frankness peppers visits like vestiges of remember;

Our burn disarms the star.

You are my laughter.

You are my honesty.

little and abrupt,

I’ll stay five foot two for you.

People, they work the world of "what" and "if,"

you will the world of "did" and "have."

What makes you who you are?

You make small harbours of must, maybe, but

like park benches and life

think me your own,

rather know it,

all things that were to be.

15 years ago this very night. . . . .