It ends with the last poem. Words continue, but they speak of someone new - no longer the poet. With a new voice, the aspiring artist has entered her twenties. She now plays house and pretends to be a woman - until, at last, it appears she is. . .
1987 marks the year I found my people, my family of choice, my tribe. I awkwardly dragged myself onto a path that would lead me forward. There was no noble reformation. I still made a lot of the same questionable choices as in years past: falling for people who would never love me, loving people who were unavailable, swearing allegiances to dead ends and impossible dreams, and then breaking the tension flippantly with easy lovers. Even as I watched those around me deadened and stupefied under the influence of the substances we abused, I was confident that my lifestyle presented no risk to me.
But I also got a little perspective in '87, and probably just in time. In the spring, one of my closest friends entered detox. What for? I literally did not believe in alcoholism before then, so it gave me a lot to think about. Later that year, I found myself in Cicero, Illinois, living with my boyfriend in a transient hotel owned by his father. The glory days of the gangsters were long past by then, leaving only the hookers, drug addicts, down-on-their luck schemers and old gamblers who spent their cash playing the horses and paid for their rooms with food stamps. I couldn't walk outside the building at night, for fear of being mistaken as a prostitute. I met a man there who had never traveled 6 miles east to the lakefront, and another who told me, "If you're going to marry a guy, make sure he has all his teeth." For someone as worldly as I tried to be, I was clearly out of my element.
I was nothing but a princess to the tenants there. And frankly, I was glad. That kind of tough life was not for me. I was a tourist in a place that never saw any visitors. I felt guilty to be able to walk away so easily - in some ways, I was more transient than anyone else there - but it was only my sense of adventure that brought me there in the first place. My stubborn self-preservation, on the other hand, readily convinced me to move on. In my home town, I had been a wild fish in a very tame pond. Chicago opened me up to the great river of life, and I was not always big enough to swim there.
Cicero was only a stop in my transition to Chicago. In the fall of 1987, at 19, I finally broke up with the boyfriend who I'd been in and out of love with for two years, moved to a neighborhood on the north side, and returned to college. Art school, this time. Everything on the class schedule was something I loved - writing, film, dance, and theater. The halls were filled with people like me: artists and searchers, some of them in trench coats with cigarettes and bottle-dyed hair, and some fresh from the suburbs, with their oxford shirts and innocent curiosity. And all there to study art. Why??? I didn't know. Maybe because for us, there really was no other way to get through college - or life, for that matter - except by alternate means. All I knew was, it made me feel less crazy to be with them. As I said, they were, and still are, my family of choice.
* * * * *
This is the best place to stop, I think. Everything that came after - the love and marriage, careers and lessons learned - it is just a human life, and it is a story that is still writing itself. I am grateful for it all, but I will leave it respectfully alone, for now. The teen poet is gone, now. Long gone. But she left her poems to turn you on. . .
