“What do you have in mind after you graduate?”

What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study over Europe, and then I thought I’d be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue.

“I don’t really know,” I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.