Read Online In Between Days by Andrew Porter - Free Book Online Page B

smiles vaguely, still sulking.
    “I’m going to be calling you next week,” Michelson says. “You’re not going to be getting out of this that easily.”
    “Okay.” Richard smiles. Then he thanks them again and starts across the patio.
    On the way home that night, he thinks about how different his life had been only a year before, how different everything had been. Only a few months shy of his graduation, he had had his whole future ahead of him. A degree from a prestigious school, a boyfriend who loved him, a family that was still functioning, a sister who was happily in college. And now, twelve months later, what did he have? What had happened? Marcus had gone off to Korea to study cooking, claiming it was only temporary but then breaking up with him a few weeks later; Chloe had gotten herself expelled from college; his parents had divorced; and his degree, as it turned out, wasn’t as valuable as he’d thought. Working for six dollars an hour at Café Brasil wasn’t exactly his idea of a promising life.
    So now, armed with a worthless degree in English and no marketable skills to speak of, he wonders what he will do, what possibilities lie before him. According to his father he should be applying to graduate school in something practical, like business or marketing; according to his mother, he should be using his degree to teach English, to embrace what she calls “the noblest profession”; and according to Michelson, he should be pursuing a degree in creative writing, going off to graduate school and beginning what he refers to as his “career as a poet.” And it is this last prospect, the uncertainty of it, but also the strange temptation of it, that most unsettles him.
    Back when he first started writing poetry, his junior year in college, he had thought of it only as an idle hobby, a casual pastime, a temporary distraction from his other courses. But somewhere along the way, something changed. He’d become drawn into it, seduced by the idea of writing poems that other people might want to read, entranced by the daily pleasure of putting words together with other words. It had become the part of his day he most looked forward to, the escape he most cherished. Still, what he couldn’t explain to Michelson or to Brandon or even to hissister was that the thought of leaving Houston to actually pursue a career in it was utterly terrifying to him. Not because he feared rejection, not because he didn’t think he could handle the graduate-level coursework of an MFA program, but because he knew that once he left, once he defined himself as a poet, once he made that commitment, he’d never again be able to pretend he didn’t care. He’d have to acknowledge that on some level this was who he was.He’d have to acknowledge to the world, and to himself, that he had something to say, and that he had something to say that he wanted other people to hear. For so long now, not caring had been his mantra. It had been the thing that defined him, the thing that had allowed him to work at Café Brasil for minimum wage, to date boys he knew he’d never love, to waste away his evenings at places like Beto’s house. In so many ways, it would be so much easier to just continue the life he’d been living, to lose himself each night in a haze of alcohol and drugs, to spend his evenings passed out on other people’s lawns, to continue writing poetry only as a casual hobby, an idle distraction, to tell people he was Richard Harding, a recent Rice graduate with no job prospects and no cares. He couldn’t live this way forever, of course, but he could live this way for a while, at least for the next few years, and in the meantime, he could enjoy the comfort of not caring, the anesthetizing freedom that came along with a life defined by excess.
    With this in mind, he turns the corner away from his apartment, away from the apartment where right now his roommate Clayton is waiting for him to return his car, and heads north toward