THIS IS AMERICA, some bro shouts from the balcony of his
white-pillared frat house.
Other bros toss a Frisbee on the quad.
Someone’s chugging something. Motherfucking America.
The one with the Frisbee is 23. Next week he’ll be welcomed
to the 42nd story of a Manhattan skyscraper. He’ll get a desk because his father has a nameplate. He may have worked his ass off since his mom let go of his sticky hand outside of kindergarten, but so have a lot of people.
Not everyone’s dads have an office door in New York.
He’s flirting with a girl who’s 22 and looking at pantsuits on her phone. She’s swallowing miles
of black cloth for the sake of an internship in D.C.,
which had better—it had just better—
land her with a career. ‘I’m interested in politics,’ she’s told countless relatives
at countless holiday parties. They all smile.
She has the same smile; she’s practiced in a mirror.
It is a very even smile. White teeth,
pink lips.
Pantsuits are silly, she tells the boy,
who’ll be wearing them for the rest of his life. But they look better
on him, they both admit. He gets to wear a tie, that might explain it.
He says something nice about her hair. She steals his Frisbee.
Tomorrow is officially summer;
tomorrow is the last first day of summer they’ll ever have quite this way.
May June July August will never be the same again. Neither of them is thinking like that.
“You can’t think like that,” somebody says drunkenly the night
before they all graduate. YOU CAN’T THINK LIKE THAT
but some of them are, standing in black robes and flat hats. This is
a very unstylish way to enter adulthood. As if they have not been adults before this moment;
as if they are adults after it. “That is an expensive piece of paper,”
a woman says as she measures the diploma for a frame,
“what’re you doing with it?”
PROVING MY ADULTHOOD. Gathering debt like wildflowers,
the bank loves me the bank loves me not, plucking job opportunities into thin air. Cubicle living is just around the corner;
cubicle living
is preferable to unemployment. Preferable to becoming the fist
in that long-running joke: English majors supersizing fries;
art majors lining leaves in frothed milk. Take what you can get.
But what if what you can get makes you happy.
What if there is nothing wrong with supersized fries.
And what if what you have taken doesn’t make you happy.
What if you have always wanted to plant the campaign trail in flags
until your hands are full of them and then you don’t anymore.
And what if Manhattan is too goddamn crowded. And what if
you get up on a rooftop in all those bright one a.m. lights
drunk on cocktails
and you decide to remind everyone I AM ONLY A CHILD
except now you’re not.