I found this doc from 2019, when I thought it was time to write a memoir lol

Retreating Wind (2015)

"I gave you all you needed:

bed of earth, blanket of blue air"

The summer I was twenty, I worked in a lab studying biofuel crops. Francesca, the principle investigator, hired too many interns and I was the last to join. They packed my desk into the back kitchen, which wasn’t really a kitchen, but a big carpeted closet with a microwave and fridge. I didn’t have a telephone because the cord wouldn’t reach that far, though no one was actually calling me there. Tamara, who sat closest to me, volunteered to receive my theoretical messages. I started buying Tiny Twist pretzels from the basement vending machine because I guessed they would taste the same no matter how old. The paint peeled, the air conditioner sighed, and I iced my knee with frozen peas the week I sprained it from running too much. Behind the face of scientific discovery crawled a trail of abandoned lab supplies and filled Rolodexes, heaping themselves into desk drawers.

Every day around one, I could expect the smell of Tamara’s garlic zucchini and grilled chicken. She was steady in her routine. Other intern meals: free granola bars from the front office, mac and cheese, Portillo’s. When it was still novel, we tested the pH of our food and drinks with litmus strips. Tamara’s blank, stern attitude mixed confusingly, then comfortingly, with her easy beauty. She spent weekends in the suburbs with her parents and her high school boyfriend, and I imagined them drinking the same strawberry protein shakes she would bring to the lab, loading laundry together in the afternoon. The conjured and vast particularities of some people can never leave you.

At the time, I was reading The Wild Iris. I texted pages from it to friends who would listen. Did anyone really feel they were entitled to multiple lives, or even the right to a full cycle? Francesca believed in plants, and so did I. Actually, she had a poster on her office door that read “Plants have the answer.” She had gone to school in Milan. Her affirmative, nonverbal sounds and rippling linen dresses expressed much without words. I stupidly couldn’t believe she was a scientist. I adored that she was a scientist. Once or twice a week, depending on the rain, we got up before dawn for field collection. We hauled the lab van to a corn farm two hours outside of the city, in a town called Mayberry. It was difficult to stay awake in the drowsing June heat. Sometimes I would fall asleep on the drive and wake suddenly, shamefully clutching my gloves and hat. Still, the Midwestern sky spread dark before us. Small, talking things.

Sampling took all day, sometimes twelve hours. It was enough time to think something up and down. All summer I tried to remain calm, and when I couldn’t, held on by extending myself even more around me. I attached myself to Bryan, Ingrid, and sometimes George. The corn reached above our heads, and relentlessly revealed any uncovered skin. Probably, the plant felt indifferent to my internal dramas. There were no bathrooms nearby so we would quickly squat in the fields between soil measurements. I asked Tamara once if she thought our pee would end up in someone else’s corn flakes, to which she responded by handing me more gas syringes. She was our informal leader in Francesca’s direct absence. I thought about how the corn leaves scraping against my cheek felt freshly shocking. How at the same time, nothing new had ever happened to them.

The verdant stalks continued to heave and roll. I tripped around George’s Old Town life with all the force in my thighs, trying to etch his surfaces. Like a water strider, I thought. I taught his dog Archie to remember my shoes, drank his gin, ate all of his Oreos. In July we went to a boat party with his friends Jay and Aaron. They were twenty-nine. God I need a cigarette, I lied. Please imagine my ass, I asked with my outfit. I wanted to play the part right. In the end I couldn’t discern what they thought of me. They had probably just come out to get drunk. I reached around my back for meaning in the gestures made before me, thinking I could pierce the warm, hot center by enacting them face-first. Girls on every boat, rooftop, and dark room in the city were showing their stomachs and drinking on someone else’s tab. I only knew of one rendition. It was made up of George’s persistent anxieties about his startup, being allowed to water his looming fern, counting the frozen salmon patties he hoarded in the freezer, touching my fingers to his castile soap that would not foam. His coarse curly hairs. Another day he asked me to a White Sox game, and joked that he was finally going to need my last name to assign the tickets. It didn’t mean anything, though.

In the lab we took turns feeding samples to the gas chromatographer. I think we were tracking nitrogen and carbon retention in the soil. When it was my turn to read the gas samples and watch the monitor save outputs in sequence, I listened to In Colour and focused on sending the slowest vibrations to Bryan. The cool, aseptic air agreeably transmitted my feelings in suspension. I learned how to make detailed soil moisture maps for Francesca, and run image classification on overhead photographs from the field. It was outrageous that they would let me have such other, devotional feelings while committing scientific acts.

I ran by the lakefront most mornings, and took the 6:15 shuttle from the lab back to my apartment near campus before night. Everyone was always around and in need of some outer design. We were on the cusp of being fully-formed and it was hysterical. It was easy to laugh about while sitting in a booth over plates of stir-fry. Even with sprained knees and weak computer eyes, I could feel screaming momentum. We walked home soaking from lake water, with an armload of cheap wine, and yelling about making cherry pie.

Ingrid was an intern at the hospital. Kelsey taught at an art camp, and Pierre also worked at the lab. I actually don’t remember what Bryan was doing. I had a second job that I kept neglecting, as a teaching assistant for a number theory class. But I never attended the lectures because of my internship, and thus struggled to grade the assignments. I held office hours a mile off campus to discourage students from coming. Sometimes, they did anyway. One evening Bryan showed up midway, offering a plantain and peanut butter sandwich that was already leaking from its foil. After he left, I ate the whole thing and licked the parts that had dripped into the creases.

By the way: once the hours set, clinging away from their mold, would every leftover sense spring back? A continuum of laughing, leaking. The floury, braided crust invited us to press down. My palms bled cherry juice, and place became immense until it was drowned and thick in my ears. Pierre ripped his shorts trying to dismantle Bryan’s screeching smoke alarm. Across the dirty kitchen floor we experienced almost settling circles. There was a party of strangers, again a sticky floor. Untwisting wet heat asked us back into the lake, spitting, jumping.

How’s the lab, Ingrid said, while we waited for the bus. I updated her on Tamara and all of the ways that she continued to be more efficient than me. I explained that the lab’s campus was so enormous, you had to bike or drive to get to another division, so I never actually saw Pierre there. I told her about how the interns all walked the crushed-limestone path to Waterfall Glen after work last week, and that the trail was named after a real man, Seymour “Bud” Waterfall. It had nothing to do with the natural feature. That’s awful, she snorted, with a satisfying laugh. Ingrid reminded me to listen to Depression Cherry all the way through, with headphones, so we could talk about it. She told me about the Atlantic article she had read on whether or not Milan Kundera still mattered. Not much. She was reading the Atlantic all the time now and thought it was really funny. In her presence, I felt greedy. We were on our way home from a strongly recommended seminar called “The Final Countdown: Completing Your Internship with a Bang.”

Ingrid, Kelsey, Pierre and I drove to Detroit on a Thursday night to see Jamie xx. It was a fragile plan, because we all needed to end up in one car after work, and there was a tight three hours to get to the eight o’clock show. Pierre was on exchange from France. He wanted to stop and take a photo splayed in front of a field that appeared boundless to the camera frame, and to obtain a paper Burger King crown. Ingrid and I bought a raspberry Slurpee and shared it with tequila in the backseat. I have a photo of our tongues out. Before the impression had been made, I understood exactly how sweet the swaddle was, exactly how many milliseconds to pour before the treacly balance was upset. We missed the show for all of those reasons, and because we hadn’t accounted for the time zone difference. Kelsey’s brother met us downtown and led us to a vampire party instead. Ingrid and I drove back home in the early morning, fake blood still smeared on our arms.

In mid-August I pushed quarters through the vending machine to purchase the last fossil-pretzels. The interns who had started in early May finished their research projects and presented their posters to the rest of us. The Jurassic window unit diligently chilled despite missing recipients. Francesca gave me ownership over all the map creation and offered to write me a recommendation. Depending on the clustering option, the way the breaks were chosen, or the color ramp, I could almost control the narrative. I still ran up the swinging blue lake in the mornings, across 47th street, then back down Greenwood. On one of the last field days, me, Tamara, and two others were left sweating. Most people will totally never guess how it feels in there, Tamara breathed proudly, motioning at Mayberry field.

In “Retreating Wind,” Gluck’s God scolds us for wanting no end in time, or maybe for some hope of return. I never felt that I personally deserved that promise. Recently, Francesca’s study came to a close, the headline of her findings appearing in my inbox. I Googled her for the first time. She has two sons, a house in Rogers Park, and a dog. I tried to imagine her pledged to any other project than the field.

"your lives are the bird's flight

which begins and ends in stillness--

which begins and ends, in form echoing

this arc from the white birch

to the apple tree."