Vignettes: American University

His name was Chris and I waited forty minutes to be shown to his cubicle and answer embarrassing questions about myself between long silences where he would pencil my answers into his paper work and I would look at the pictures of his family thumb tacked to the walls and wonder about his daughter and wonder if he ever wondered that I'm a daughter, too; but I didn't go back after that, and the agency sent me three of the same letter over a few weeks before we forgot about each other until tonight when I can't sleep and the stories eddy through my narrator making desperate the fact that at 4am there isn't anyone to hear.

And I remember they all thought it was funny, the nurses, that I would sit and read the whole packet front to back, but what did they expect me to do, color another mandala, how many mandalas can one color between 5am vitals and 10pm lights out? I chose COPE out of the three agencies because it had the most hopeful sounding name, it had something to offer, the ability to, acquire the skill to, learn how to, and yet, just as taking the pills I had turned into a daily ritual of self punishment, in the back of my mind coping always felt like a cop out, like not really solving the problem, like giving up and resigning oneself to living with it, so that reaching out for the hope COPE had to offer was perverted into telling myself I'd really given up.

And at the end of my last semester of college we did a big concert in Centennial hall where admission was one can of food for the food bank, and I myself had been too embarrassed to go to my interview for food stamps earlier that month, so I didn't bring anything to donate, I needed all the food in my house, which was about one can of black beans and one watermelon, but then backstage they said we were to line up and drop out cans into a box in front of the stage one by one, making a big show of the school's generosity, before we took our seats in the orchestra. Panicked and embarrassed I had to ask my section mate for a can to donate, and he gave it without questions, without funny looks, and to this day when I think about gratitude that instance replays itself in my mind. And I remember being on stage, being applauded before the concert began, and I stood there, being looked at by a crowd of hundred for whom I was to perform, but not being seen by them, I stood there, in the midst of a great public show of all that the university did for the community, of all that the kindness of these people did for those less fortunate people, I stood there, hungry, broke, with a concert to play, for all these generous, generous, generous people.