I’m riding out on the apathy-colored wave of having shut myself in the library for the past three days; I am at Open Eye but this means nothing as far as productivity goes. Rainy nights at coffee shops are bad. Thunderstorms are one of the things that gets me most jazzed about being alive; but you pair that with a coffee shop and a three-hour night that involved not one, but two cups of coffee and not one, but two five-hour energy shots…well, this is what you get: a crash, a little unproductivity and a night of Emily Dickinson.

It’s funny, because outside of coffee-shop adrenaline withdrawals, Emily Dickinson just keeps coming into my life. This semester, I mean, but also always. She’s been my favorite poet since I can remember, but I know this experience isn’t singular to me. I remember Donald Miller writing in Blue Like Jazz that falling in love with Emily Dickinson is a fundamental part of the American male’s adolescence experience; I identify, even though I’m no American male. I think that everyone identifies with Emily Dickinson because she’s just this enigma, this person in a white dress that writes everything you think, but you can’t ever pin her down or capture her or explain away her reclusivity. So that’s Emily; the woman you don’t know but can conform and shape to whatever you really need, wherever you are. Maybe this is projecting a lot on this poor woman, but that’s the way it is.

My English teacher is in love with Emily Dickinson; he owns one of the two photographs that exist of Emily. Sitting in class, it isn’t hard to grasp that his Emily (despite that white dress) is an overtly sexual being. Two weeks after reading Emily Dickinson in class, tonight, Lauren sent me a novella-long article (which is quite good; you can find it here) about that poet, so here I am, thinking about her again.

My Emily looked different when I was fourteen than she does now: then, she was clever and in love with trees and did really witty things with exclamation marks. The Emily I know now is kind of crazy and still in love with trees and really wise about God and afraid of God and in love with love but also terrified of intimacy. My Emily likes thunderstorms as much as I do, and can write things like this that also make you jazzed about being alive:

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

And you know, maybe if you’re my English Professor or really any other literary critic in the world, this is a poem about sexual passion. But the thing about Emily is that she can apply to you even when she can’t, and in that case, that poem can apply to you when you’re sitting on a coffee shop after a really rugged couple weeks with the rain streaming pollen down windshields and the Beatles bursting out the speakers. Here! I mean, damn, she’s everywhere.

PS: and I mean, sorry about taking the liberty of calling her straight-up Emily. you know.

PPS: there is nothing to make you regret the thrift-shop indecision of the December Salvation Army Run 2009 like seeing someone REALLY pulling off an acid-washed mom jean skirt. that skirt should have been mine.