8:45 p.m. at 26 Elmwood Road
8:45 p.m. at 26 Elmwood Road is the only constant that year you’re perpetually unemployed, rootless, in limbo. You spend your days drinking tea and attempting to write and applying to jobs and interviewing and walking to and from the library and reading more than ever before, tearing through books simply because they feel solid in your hands. The only recurring event on your calendar is picking up your girlfriend from her closing shift at Wellesley Books every Saturday night, a journey that takes you ten minutes down the road.
Your girlfriend has seven jobs to your zero and somehow still manages to be the one who makes the grocery lists and cooks dinner and gently persuades you to get out of bed in the morning. You have one car and live in a tiny apartment with no doors in a city you moved to for no reason at all except for the fact that you needed a place to live.
You’re a Sylvia Plath girl at heart—the too-muchness of her journals a mirror for your tender, ambitious self. You’d always been afraid to write down how much love and rage you actually felt—the thrill of clandestinely holding hands with your best friend, the burn of an acquaintance scoffing at your undergrad’s lack of prestige—but Sylvia wasn’t. She owned her confidence and her insecurities. She didn’t hide behind anonymous Tumblr posts. You know she grew up around here, but you didn’t realize her childhood home was so close by until you came across a blog post from one of her most prolific scholars. Plugging the address into Google Maps reveals that it is along the route you drive on Saturday nights, so you decide to swing by, just to see what’s changed from the 1940s.
You make this visitation part of the routine. There’s a kind of satisfaction in fixing your gaze on a New England Colonial, a structure with a firm foundation, when you otherwise feel so unmoored. The house soothes you with its symmetry: two windows flanking the front door, three positioned above, all framed with black shutters. You note the attentively shoveled stone walkway, the wreath on the door, the round, trimmed bushes. Because it’s winter, and well after sundown, you’re always crawling through the pitch black of the quiet neighborhood, hoping you don’t look suspicious in your 2003 Honda Accord.
She’s not here, you tell yourself for the hundredth time, and yet you still whisper your fears to her from across the street: the assistant director job you’ll never get, the wedding in a historic library you can’t afford, the settled, comfortable, worry-free future you try so hard for but can’t seem to make real. The knowledge that she was here once is enough to make you peer more closely into the living room window, where she might have done ordinary things while feeling extraordinarily out of place. Oh Sivvy, you think, mourning another day lost to the weirdness of this in-between life, what am I even doing? “Waiting, waiting,” the icy January wind whistles, for something to happen here, for you to be the person it happens to.
About the Author
Ash Trebisacci (they, she) is a writer based in the Boston area. Their work has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Pangyrus, JMWW, and Moist Poetry Journal. When they're not driving by the houses of dead poets, they're likely drinking tea, taste testing their wife's baked goods, or watching women's gymnastics. Find them on Twitter until the bitter end @ishmish17.
Illustration by Jane Demarest.
Edited by Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha.
