With Regards

I read the words. I don’t read the sentence. I don’t get to the period. My eyes jump to the letterhead and I bore through the paper with my thoughts. I am not looking at the letter. The school’s signature and font merely screen thoughts of other schools from muddling this moment, the moment in which all my imagining of what getting an MFA from this specific school might have looked like—the move there, my commute, the surrounding city, the classes, the hours spent working on assignments, the time at the writer’s desk—is shattered. I don’t know why it is a wine glass, but it is, and it holds all of those hopes and my ambition and it is falling from a not so great height, because it doesn’t take a great height to break a wine glass, and it hits the ground and the thin stem folds under the weight of my future. It splits, breaking into sharp pieces of a dream that scatter along the floor into dark corners where sweeping won’t work.

I feel like there are ten of me. We each have a door in front of us representing a school I applied to. Four of us now are lying on the ground motionless. I should only be 4/10 less hopeful, but I feel 9/10 less hopeful.

The schools that have rejected me are erased from my memory. I grab each vision of a future there and throw it in the trash. I file the rejection letter away. I don’t know why I am keeping it. Maybe I will frame them all in the end, a testament to a magnificent failure. Something I like to think of as being wildly motivational, but really, it is just depressing, what I received in turn for dreaming, “I regret to inform you.”