I’m Amanda. I’ve got wide eyes, a smart mouth, and a MetroCard. And I’m not afraid to use them.
I printed the contents of my first blog, a year long stint on Open Diary during my junior year of high school. I look back at what I wrote, at how I wrote, and I roll my eyes…a lot. I thought the silliest things were so devastating. This is how teenagers think, though.
I tried to post something in honor of Megan’s birthday yesterday, but Blogger was extrememly uncooperative. So…this isn’t belated, it was bedeviled.
I took this picture the other day. I saw me, but upon closer examination saw my dad - the chin, the length of the nose, something about the way he holds his mouth. I saw the fullness of my mom’s face, the size of her eyes, the crease at the tip of her nose. I saw my sister gone lighter.
I love being a Southerner in New York City. I don’t have an accent or close-minded conservative ideals - nothing that could be a social liability in this metropolitan blue state. People are always surprised when I reveal my Southern background.
Sometimes the ones you love will do you a favor and give pieces of yourself back to you.
They will forgive, and instead of forgetting, remember how hard times were, shake their heads, and keep loving you despite your tendency to be a fallible human being.
Someday I hope somehow says to you, “You know, I really wanted to hate you and stay angry, but I want to be your friend. I’m going to be your friend.”
My dad has been in town the last few days, and I’ve been more places and eaten more meals in this time than I have in a while. It’s not that I let myself starve or fester in the apartment, but there are nights when I just eat cereal and read myself to sleep. O, ye glamorous New York life!
Clouds hang heavy,
sagging low like teats -
rain is set to spill.
The clean, unfamiliar
smell a friendly warning,
the way you sigh, roused
before the shrill cry
of the alarm, the way
my mother would wake me.
It’s a small, small world.
Her name was Mrs. Anderson, and she had a moustache. She went into our Texas History class to substitute one day in 1995, and I’m sure she still hasn’t recovered.
