Pouring coffee on my keyboard somewhere around page twenty-eight: check.

Having poured coffee on my keyboard, screaming: check.

Anxiety dreams of nakedness: check.

Putting on a summer dress and gold earrings and turning up Aretha Franklin and dancing to just one song for a break, okay, two, no, wait this is a great one, too, okay, stop, stop, get back to work: uh, check.

Printing and binding and handing in L’alchimiste du souvenir et la mémoire des mots : L’ethnopoésie du soi dans “Biffures”: oh baby you’d better believe it, check.

Man,

just,

man,

I don’t know what to say. I can’t talk about it. It’s done, it’s off my table, there are parts I think are really good, and there are parts I think are kind of sketchy. Everybody cross your fingers for nobody noticing the sketchy parts. The defense is Tuesday morning, and the image playing in my mind on a continuous reel is this: I’m sitting in front of the two professors across from a large table. They look at each other, then they turn to look at me, then they shake their heads, slowly, simultaneously. They put the thesis down on the table and gesture at it, and say, “What is this?”

And the thing is, they’re not about to Zoolander.

But so there it is, all these months of whining come to an end. There were the midnight walks to the Tea Lounge. There were NO PARTIES. There were the three hours on the phone with Maud over cold tofu (me) and radishes and cigarettes (her) while she rehauled the first third of my paper. (Maud, you’re amazing. Your rise to the top is gonna rock. Call me when you get there, you know my number.) There was sitting on the stoop somewhere around four in the morning, listening to the birds wake up in the trees.

Wednesday when I handed in my thesis, the sun and everybody were out. All afternoon I kept running into people, Kevin and Matt Z and Sarah and Jason and Kevin again, and everyone was happy and congratulatory. Matt Z said, “Wow, you wrote all of this.” “I know!” I said. “In French,” he said. “I know!!” I said.

And then I walked from 116th to 72nd, and then I took a bath, and then I dreamt I was hanging out with you and it was nice.

In the morning, I baked two loaves of banana bread.