The Two Kinds of Decay

1996

At some point after the year 2000, I read my journal from beginning to end and saw I had recorded nothing of consequence in 1996 and threw away that year in disgust.

So I don’t know what happened between my fake graduation and my real graduation.

I remember feeling bereft that my class had graduated without me. One of my suitemates moved to Romania, the other to Borneo. Everyone’s life seemed better than my life.

In the class picture, shot in June on the steps of Widener Library with a rolling camera, for which at least a thousand of us were present, I stand between two handsome friends, one of whom later worked as a catalog model. In the photo my face is absolutely round. It is one of only a few photographs I allowed anyone to take of my steroid-poisoned body.

In the fall of 1996 I enrolled in my final semester of college. I was in love with someone I’d met in New York and rode the Greyhound bus from Boston to New York and back at odd times. Once I took an early bus back from New York on a Tuesday morning and made it to my Tuesday afternoon poetry class on time.

After college I moved to New York and lived in the obligatory small apartments full of friends and friends of friends, knowing I’d be leaving in six months for graduate school. I had the usual adventures people have when they move to New York.