Dear John

This is a time when having a semi- secret blog that none of your friends in everyday life know about comes in handy. I have a big secret to share.

I am leaving school.

Just now, I wrote "I am quitting school" but then I deleted it and substituted in "leaving" instead. Leaving is a better way to say it. It has more agency to it. It implies that I am making a choice, looking to something else, rather than collapsing under a load too great for me.

After this year I will have a master's degree. If all goes well, that is. After that I am meant to stay for an indefinite number of years and get my PhD. When you visit the school I attend, they tell you that most graduate students finish the program in 5 years. They are lying. Most graduate students finish in 7 years if they are lucky. Nine is not unheard of.

Ever since I was young, I wanted to live a life of the mind. In fact, even as a child I did this in many ways. I wasn't very good socially. There was always a lot going on at home, and I didn't want people to know me too awfully well. They might find out what I really was- what my life was really like. And I didn't want that. Plus, I preferred to read rather than run. I couldn't get dirty because of the hell I would catch at home. So I ended up being a very bookish child who said all the right things to get her ostracized and picked on. Things like, "no, I can't get my dress dirty." or "in answer to your question, no I did not think that test was hard/unfair/stupid." I had not yet learned that when people ask you certain questions, they are engaging you in a call and response ritual rather than actually seeking information that they currently lack.

I always thought that once I got to high school things would be different. They were, of course, worse. And then I thought once I became and undergraduate things would be different. They weren't. And then I said to myself- I'm going to graduate school. And there things will most certainly be different. Then I will belong and life will start to flower as I had hoped. Things are different. But they are not flowering. In fact, now that I have experienced graduate school with all its cultish properties, unreasonable sacrifices, petty politics, and cloistered existence, the very idea of a delicate purple bloom rising from the dirt and opening its heart to the sky seems such an inappropriate metaphor as to be an ironic sight gag.

This is not the life for me. I could list a million reasons why. And I have- in my head, in talking to my boyfriend, in preparing what I will tell people who ask me to explain myself. But I don't think listing all the reasons here is that important. The fact is, the fit with graduate school/academia and me is an ill one. If pressed, I would have to say that academia is decidedly too tight in the waste, too long in the leg, and makes my ass look incredibly fat.

The real problem, though, is that dreams are not like pairs of jeans. They are like a great many things, and I'm sure that all these things dreams are like have been thoroughly covered in the collected acts of toastmastery of the human race. But for me here, it does better to say what a dying dream or a leaving dream feels like. It feels like someone you know and love is dying. It feels like your dog has run away. It feels like betrayal, abandonment, and finally settles in to the stale feeling of grief.

The idea that one day I would live this particular academic life was an imaginary friend I turned to when I felt lonely as a child. It was something that gave me succor and reassured me. Like an ancient Hebrew wandering the desert with Moses, I just kept telling myself- one day you will find this place of milk and honey. And then everything will be beautiful. And you will feel right. Academia was a panacea. I wouldn't be depressed, I would be honored for my talents, I would be understood, successful, even in some strange way- popular? I pictured cocktail parties in wood paneled rooms where people sipped sherry in the afternoons in front of fireplaces. The conversation and the glasses would be sparkling and I would be proclaimed a witty fabulous treasure. In time, perhaps I would amass a cadre of students who looked up to me, and whose reputations I would mold under the shadow of my own large one.

In the outside world, people would ask me what I do and I would tell them about a project of mine. I pictured work a day suburbanites looking at me strangely as though I were a rare object. Like a piece of African tribal art someone's weird and perpetually unmarried globe trotting aunt sent them as a wedding gift from Burma. Interesting but so- foreign. I would become a living breathing conversation piece.

In the end, I got here and found out that none of this was going to be my life. My department didn't have a lot of money and people drank out of plastic tumblers at department gatherings. The fireplaces in the old renovated house where our offices were had been sealed up decades ago. One housed an old broken overhead projector someone had shoved in there for no real reason other than it was a blank space. Judging by its layers of dust, that same person may have worked for the Eisenhower campaign or known someone who had.

The dream had left me, been taken in the night, or simply passed away suddenly but peacefully in its sleep of a brain aneurysm. The point is that one day, when I felt shaky and reached for this dream for assurance and calm, it wasn't there anymore.

I will have to now reconstruct my vision for my future. From scratch out of totally new materials. I will have to build this goal out of things that I want and want to be. This presumes that there are things I am not that someday I would like to be. This is very different than the old dream, in which I am finally paid my due by a world that for so long has frightened me, a world that I felt someday would hand me an apology for all the times I wasn't allowed to play.

Seeing it this way, I wonder why my old dream didn't leave me a dear john letter. All those years together, and no notice. What would it have said?

Dear B,

This is the hardest letter I've ever had to write.

[Yeah, right, I'd say to myself at this point in the letter- they all start out that way. If it's so hard, don't write it. Stay.]

We've had a lot of years together. But it's time for me to move on now. I know a letter is a really chicken shit way to do this,

[you got that right!]

but this seems like the only way.

I know you won't believe me, but this is the best thing for both of us, if we just remember what we had- the good times- and go our separate ways.

I'm going to give you a reason because I know you want one, you deserve one, and let's face it- isn't that what these letters are for anyway?

The real reason I'm leaving, B, is that I am not real anyway. I am a figment of your imagination, a conjuring of your own mind. And when you tried to bring me to life, to make me a real boy as it were, I just dissipated. You found out the rabbit was in the hat all along and that the coin has two heads on it.

I am so sorry. I hope one day we can be friends.

~Your Dream
PS I'm taking the lamp in the living room because I bought it for reading Foucault in the evenings. I am also taking your tweed skirt suit for reasons I think you already know.