Sometimes I Think About It

by Stephen Elliott

  Shakespeare’s memorial is still standing, the picture surrounded by candles and totems. I pass it before walking across the quarter-mile expanse of sand to the ocean.

  The water is much colder than when I first arrived and shocks me awake. I dive in—thinking of dead poets, third-round funding, seed funding, pre–seed funding, series A—and emerge into the soft haze of a mild and cloudy day, thirty, forty feet from shore. The sun is hidden and the color drained from the sky. Stores are slowly opening on the boardwalk, shop owners rattling and raising the steel gates. Artists are setting up tables to sell pictures at the edge of the beach. I wonder, Is this just a dream? Or is it the American dream?

  Many of the homeless are still sleeping; I can see the dark outlines of their bags as well as a house painted white and blue and named for a smartphone app. I swim back toward shore. I’ve always wanted to settle down, but I never did. I wrote in an essay, applying to law school, “I left home when I was thirteen. It was the best decision I ever made.” I was accepted to the University of Virginia, but I decided not to go. I was homeless the entire year I was in eighth grade, until the beginning of high school, and I never really stopped being a runaway. I never did go home. I’m driven but restless. I want to achieve, but I don’t know what. I have so much ambition, like Venice, like Abbot Kinney building canals in a marsh nobody wanted. Seeing the possible in the impossible. Though when it didn’t work out quite as planned, Kinney—like Paige Craig, like Danny Zappin—made the best of the situation. They took what they saw with both hands, grabbing as much ocean and land as they could.

  —Los Angeles, 2015

  1. Not her real name.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank Ethan Nosowsky—an editor is not an easy person to find—and everyone at Graywolf Press.

  Stephen Elliott is the author of eight books, including The Adderall Diaries, a best book of the year in Time Out New York, a best book of 2009 in Kirkus Reviews, and one of fifty notable books in the San Francisco Chronicle.

  His novel Happy Baby was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award as well as a best book of the year in Salon.com, Newsday, Newcity, the Journal News, and the Village Voice.

  Elliott’s writing has been featured in Esquire, the New York Times, the Believer, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing.

  He is the founding editor of the Rumpus and senior editor at Epic Magazine. He created the web series Driven and has directed three movies: About Cherry, Happy Baby, and After Adderall.

  The text of Sometimes I Think About It is set in Utopia. Book design and composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.