You Are Here

I woke up feeling sick.

I didn’t sleep well last night, kept up by a series of imagined What-Ifs and Worst Cases too horrific to get into here, but all of which involved time and deadlines and deepening self-doubt; thoughts that led to my waking every couple of hours, terrified, clutching sheets damp with sweat, mind confused and speeding before veering under again for the sixth, seventh, eighth time.

I brushed a thick, flu-like bitterness from my mouth and caught the 75 outbound for Oakland. I tried (as a courtesy) to sit alone, rebalancing my temporal checkbook and gauging in feverish, panicked fragments the academic consequences of a day lost to illness.

If I’m too sick to write, I’ll finish my multi-genre piece tomorrow, and get to my lit paper on Friday,

                        But I have to pack Friday, plus we have class, and really I should sleep in some that day so I’m rested

            for AWP, especially,

                                                and what I’m feeling is either the flu or sleep

deprivation,

Was that a sick cough or a smoker’s cough?

Don’t touch anything

                                                on this bus,

Shit! I still have three books to read—

Am I hot or cold? This can’t be good,

Maybe I can just read

in bed

all day,

Worry about writing        later

             

STOP REQUESTED

You Are Here.

That last thought wasn’t so much my own as borrowed from the map I found myself in front of. I stood at the western entrance of Schenley Plaza, having come here in my delirium almost automatically, fever steaming up the inside of my nylon jacket. My phone buzzed.

Reminder: Wednesday, 9:30 am—Schenley Plaza for Nature Writing (posts due @ 12a Sundays)

When I’m overwhelmed, I stop thinking and do whatever I can to keep up with my calendar. I go where it says I should be, I stop when it says to stop.

I stared into the reminder that I Am Here, into this sign confirming my place in the world. I saw myself in its dim reflectiveness and let myself breathe.

Suddenly I felt ridiculous.

I’d left the house without putting socks on beneath my boots.

I’d come without my notebook.

In the plaza’s wide-openness I stopped, for the first time that morning, the gush of anxieties that’d been plaguing me all week. There was nothing beautiful or unusual about the plaza, but standing at its entrance on a drenched sidewalk, all of a sudden I understood the phrase ‘coming to your senses.’ The day was cloudy and cool but warmer that what I’d been used to. The soft humidity smelled like rain—an incredible, elating smell after the punitive sharpness of settling snow. I unzipped my coat, applying the breeze directly to my overheated skin. Patches of green grass rose from gaps in the lawn’s snowcover. Water dripped from the edges of everything: from the circular white pavilion tent, from the circular food stands, from the circular abdomen of our still-unfinished snowman. The drips came down in staggered rhythms, like a roomful of ticking clocks, making a backdrop for the noticeable uptick in bird noise.

I wonder about birds and their calendars. According to Kate St. John’s Bird Blog over at WQED, the tiny gray swirls around the tops of buildings that surround Schenley Plaza may have been peregrine falcons, which visit Pittsburgh in the winter and perch on her high roofs before heading north for the summer.

It’s hard to imagine Pittsburgh as a place to escape the cold.

But as I came out of Pitt’s library after taking some recycled paper to write on, feeling less feverish in the warming breeze, it seemed, for a minute, that maybe I’d escape it too. And I felt better.

***

(As a side note, I usually listen to music for a few minutes while I'm outside. I figured I might as well start sharing that as well, as it's part of my experience of the place. Enjoy!)