Emily Dickinson and Her Heart of Glass
Emily Dickinson was not the dead poet.
This should probably be established first.
She was alive.
She had children.
She had a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree and had attended three different colleges over the course of becoming middle aged.
She had gone to school as an adult while raising children, which meant she knew something about filling out forms at kitchen tables, studying after everyone went to bed, finding money where there wasn’t any, driving to class while thinking about dinner, and wondering whether changing your life halfway through it was an act of courage or insanity. And she did this while the world went from paper to computers to web 2.0. She had walked the technology bridge of higher education while it was being built. And she had done it in a rural area and in a city. She understood the confusion and frustration this could cause people. By the grace of god she had persisted and earned her degrees.
The Institute loved people like Emily Dickinson.
At least according to its brochures.
Adult learners.
Returning students.
Working parents.
People seeking transformation.
Emily was practically a walking recruitment campaign.
Nobody noticed.
Boy, did they fuck that up biggly.
They would fuck up most things.
Emily did not know that yet.
Because no one was allowed to say fuck much less fuck up.
The Library
At first they put Emily Dickinson in the library.
Emily liked the library. She had wanted that.
Books behaved reasonably. Books had always been her friends.
If a book was missing, eventually somebody could determine that it was missing.
If a book belonged somewhere, there was generally a number indicating where.
This was comforting.
The Institute itself was less straightforward.
It was made of glass and mirrors and lights.
Glass doors.
Glass walls.
Glass display cases.
Windows reflecting windows reflecting people walking past other windows.
Lights hummed overhead. Flickered. Buzzed.
Screens hung in hallways and lobbies, flashing information at people who were already there.
Registration deadlines.
Meetings.
Events.
Events that had already happened.
Events that had been canceled.
Occasionally the wrong room.
Occasionally the wrong date.
But always the weather.
72°. Partly cloudy. More weather expected.
And here is the time.
The weather was apparently the one thing the Institute felt qualified to state with confidence.
It was often not accurate.
The library had its own peculiarities.
Books disappeared.
Books appeared where they did not belong.
Software vanished from computers.
Passwords changed.
The door counter produced numbers nobody could explain.
Students received charges for things they insisted they had returned.
Rules concerning rooms seemed to change according to who was asking and who was answering.
Emily fixed what she could.
Explained what she could.
Apologized for things she had not done.
She was good at this.
Emily Dickinson was forgiving.
Accommodating.
Sometimes confused.
When something did not make sense, she generally assumed there was information she did not have.
Institutions were complicated.
People made mistakes.
Surely everyone was doing the best they could.
WE ARE WATCHING YOU
Then somebody left Emily a note. But not Emily. Just in the library when she opened. Could have been for anybody. Could have been poetry. Just a creative project. An exercise.
WE ARE WATCHING YOU.
Books had been pushed from shelves.
A door looked damaged.
Emily did what people do when they work somewhere with security officers and maintenance departments.
She reported it.
Verbally, because that was how she had been instructed to report things.
Security took the note.
Maintenance looked at the door.
People looked around.
Emily trusted that the matter had been handled.
And technically it had.
Just not in any way she understood.
Someone had apparently been inside the library at night.
The library had been locked.
Which meant whoever entered had been able to unlock it.
Only certain people could do that.
One was the security guard.
But surely not him.
The security guard a county employee was helpful.
He did helpful things all the time.
He was a friend of Boss Man.
He appeared frequently in Boss Man’s orbit.
Emily had no reason to consider him an enemy.
Emily Dickinson did not yet know that the security guard considered her one.
He would eventually say so himself.
Enemy.
His word.
Emily had not realized they were fighting.
She had not realized there were sides.
She had not realized she had been entered into anything.
The screen outside continued glowing.
69°. Chance of showers.
The custodian a county worker put out Caution Wet Floors signs. She stood with a mop. DON’T SLIP! she said. She did this several days in a a row. Emily tried to politely ignore the crazy behavior.
Two Doors
Eventually Emily’s library job changed.
Or disappeared.
Or transformed in one of those institutional ways where technically nothing terrible has happened because there is another opportunity waiting for you.
There were two doors.
Behind one door was becoming Boss Man’s assistant.
Behind the other was effectively no job.
The assistant position offered more hours.
More money.
Better benefits.
Emily had children.
Emily chose the door that opened.
Boss Man
Boss Man had never asked Emily where she went to school.
He did not ask what she had studied.
He did not ask what her master’s degree was in.
He did not ask what it was like to return to college while raising children.
He did not ask what she was good at.
He did not ask what she hoped to do.
He did not seem particularly curious about Emily Dickinson at all.
He had assessed her more the way a man assesses a lamp.
Would it look good in the room?
Boss Man liked people around him.
Women around him.
Men around him.
Assistants.
Visitors.
People laughing in doorways.
People entering his office carrying folders.
People leaving his office believing they had shared something important.
Boss Man liked the visual effect.
Charlie’s Angels, perhaps, if Charlie had spent considerably more time forwarding emails and answering his cell phones.
He liked being Boss Man.
And Boss Man possessed a particular kind of talent.
He knew who required flattering.
Who enjoyed gossip.
Who needed reassurance.
Who could safely be mocked.
Who needed to feel powerful.
Who needed to feel protective.
Who might become useful.
He knew when to appear wounded.
When to appear charming.
When to confess weakness.
When to compliment someone extravagantly and then say something entirely different about them after they walked away.
People often left Boss Man feeling special.
That was the trick.
Emily Dickinson watched this from increasingly close range.
At first she tried to understand it.
Then she tried to accommodate it.
Eventually she became disgusted by it.
But that took time.
Emily was slow to conclude that somebody meant harm when incompetence, confusion, personality or ordinary human foolishness might explain things just as well.
This was both one of her better qualities and one of the things that made the Institute particularly difficult to survive.
The Screens
Of the completely random things they put her in charge of, they put Emily Dickinson in charge of the screens.
Nobody explained precisely what in charge meant.
The screens were everywhere.
Emily was given access.
So she updated them.
Apparently she did this well when she was not suppose to.
Then someone changed the way they were accessed.
Emily figured that out too.
Then Boss Man asked her to change what appeared on them.
Emily changed it.
What Emily did not know was that the screens apparently belonged, in an invisible territorial sense, to the Head of Marketing.
Boss Man had therefore placed Emily in direct conflict with the Head of Marketing.
Emily did not know she was in conflict with the Head of Marketing.
The Head of Marketing might not have known at first either.
Boss Man knew.
Or maybe Boss Man didn’t know.
He knew to verbally tell Emily to do things. And for her only to verbally with her mouth smiling reply.
Never in email.
It was sometimes difficult to determine whether Boss Man was playing chess or had simply lost several pieces beneath the sofa.
Then Boss Man wanted flyers.
Emily made flyers.
Boss Man told Emily to put the flyers up.
Emily put them up.
On doors.
Apparently this was a Huge No.
There were rules about flyers.
Approved flyers.
Unapproved flyers.
Approved locations for approved flyers.
Unapproved locations for approved flyers.
Doors occupied some especially sacred category Emily had unknowingly violated.
So Emily Dickinson taped Boss Man’s unapproved flyers to the forbidden doors.
And everyone waited.
Nothing happened.
No reprimand.
No sharply worded email.
No memo beginning:
It has come to our attention...
Nothing.
People walked past the flyers.
Emily walked past the flyers.
The screens glowed overhead.
69°. Mostly sunny.
Everyone seemed to be thinking the same thing.
What the fuck?
Nobody said it.
What the fuck was forbidden obviously in an institute of higher learn.
No ifs, ands or fucks about it.
No fuckery whatsoever.
Coffee
Then they put Emily Dickinson in charge of coffee.
This involved putting out coffee.
And Styrofoam cups.
Simple enough.
Until the coffee disappeared.
And a canister of sugar wandered.
And the cups disappeared.
Not disappeared exactly.
They had been moved.
Possibly upstairs.
Possibly into the attic.
Possibly still in the van.
Nobody seemed sure.
“Have you looked in the van?”
Emily looked in the van.
“Maybe they’re upstairs.”
Emily looked upstairs.
“Did you check the attic?”
Emily checked the attic.
Later:
“Have you looked in the van?”
Yes.
Emily Dickinson had looked in the van.
She had looked upstairs.
She had looked in the attic.
She had looked in places where coffee cups had no obvious evolutionary reason to live.
The particularly strange part was that some of the people asking Emily where things were seemed also to be the people who had moved them.
Eventually nobody remembered anything.
Perhaps the coffee had achieved institutional independence.
Perhaps the cups had transferred departments.
Perhaps they were in a meeting.
One morning Emily could not find her own coffee cup.
There were Styrofoam cups available again.
At least some.
Emily took one.
She poured coffee into it.
Coffee immediately began dripping through the bottom.
Emily lifted the cup.
There was a tiny hole.
A neat little pinhole.
Nobody had deliberately put a pinhole through a stack of Styrofoam coffee cups.
Obviously.
No.
That would be ridiculous.
There were surely many perfectly ordinary explanations for tiny holes appearing in coffee cups.
Emily Dickinson simply did not know what they were.
She threw away the cup.
The screen in the hallway announced:
69°. All is fair in love and war.
Emily chose another cup. It leaked too.
The janitor appeared with a mop and a Wet Floor sign.
She stood leaning on the mop, “Don’t slip.”
She was so helpful.
Rad and Rod
Rad and Rod were difficult to explain.
This was partly because nothing they did, individually, sounded particularly impressive when described afterward.
A thing moved.
A word repeated strangely.
A conversation redirected.
A door closed.
A question answered sideways.
A smirk.
A tone.
An interruption.
Something Emily had carefully arranged was changed.
Something she had been told to do suddenly became something she apparently should have known not to do.
Something everybody knew turned out to be something nobody was permitted to say.
Paper cuts.
That was the difficulty.
Nobody calls an ambulance for a paper cut.
Emily absorbed them.
One.
Then another.
Then another.
She coped.
Emily became extremely good at coping.
Rad and Rod liked their chairs in Big Boss’s office.
They felt chosen when the light was on them.
They were finally recognized for being special.
Emily Builds a Tiny Country
She found books.
Art.
Interesting students.
Kind people passing through.
A sentence worth remembering.
Something beautiful on her desk.
A conversation that mattered.
Emily constructed a tiny country inside the Institute and tried to live there.
She worked.
She helped people.
She learned when to stay quiet.
She learned when something strange was not worth questioning.
She learned to walk away.
She learned that Boss Man wanted mirrors.
People who reflected back the version of himself he preferred to see.
Important.
Desired.
Connected.
Necessary.
Emily Dickinson was terrible at being a mirror.
She kept reflecting the actual room.
Her eyes were a problem.
Her mouth was worse.
The Institute
The Institute remained made of glass and mirrors and lights.
And screens.
Always screens.
Information flashed everywhere.
Some correct.
Some incorrect.
Some irrelevant.
Always the weather.
The longer Emily remained there, the more dizzying the building became.
Glass allowed her to see through things without understanding them.
Mirrors showed versions of reality depending upon where someone stood.
Lights exposed everything while illuminating surprisingly little.
Screens supplied information without knowledge.
There was constant visibility and very little clarity.
People said:
“I’ll take care of it.”
Then nothing happened.
Things disappeared.
Things appeared.
Things were somebody’s responsibility until responsibility became inconvenient, at which point they belonged to nobody.
Problems could simultaneously be urgent and nonexistent.
Emily kept trying to find the floor.
Death
Then Emily’s adult stepson died.
Death is inconvenient to institutions.
It arrives without consulting calendars.
It ignores deadlines.
It does not care that there is a meeting at two.
Emily returned to work too soon.
Home needed to return to routines, but work was not a safe place to return to.
And she had returned without skin.
That was what it felt like.
She felt raw.
The protective layer between Emily and everything else had disappeared.
Light entered harder.
Sound entered deeper.
Laughter could strike her physically.
Her body startled before her mind understood why.
Her heart raced.
Her nerves buzzed.
Her thoughts sometimes arrived too quickly.
Emily Dickinson was still functioning.
Still working.
Still accommodating.
Still attempting to be reasonable.
But something inside her had become extraordinarily thin.
Glass can withstand remarkable pressure.
Until it cannot.
And only a week after her adult stepson had died, the papercuts began again.
Birthdays
They put Emily Dickinson in charge of birthdays.
Ironically, she had to get cards signed for people who were opening cruel to her, and birthday cakes for people who were openly uninterested in her.
Nobody announced this as cruelty.
Nobody had to intend it as cruelty. Truly. Why would a place operate like that? Birthdays and cake as performances? Seriously. What the fuck are you thinking? No way was this anything but innocent.
But it was simply another opportunity provided by the ordinary machinery of the Institute.
Cake.
Plates.
Napkins.
Candles.
Plastic cuts.
Plastic water bottles.
Plastic cutlery.
“Let them eat cake.” Who had said that?
Coffee was available, presumably, if anyone could find it.
Emily did what Emily always did.
She arranged everything.
She remembered.
She made the table cheerful.
Then she planned to leave.
She needed to go lie down.
She could set things up and slip away before everyone arrived.
That would work.
But people arrived quickly.
They gathered.
They laughed.
It seemed louder than usual.
Perhaps it wasn’t.
Maybe Emily was simply hearing everything differently now.
Someone called out.
Someone laughed again.
More people appeared.
They gathered beneath the glass and lights.
The screens glowed.
69°. Mostly sunny.
Then they began singing.
Happy birthday.
Loudly.
Emily stood there.
Glass.
Mirrors.
Faces.
Light.
Teeth.
Laughter.
Singing.
Her stepson was dead.
Her husband felt like dying sometimes.
She felt exhausted.
Someone clapped and laughed.
Someone slapped someone else on the back like they were brothers.
Hardy har har har!
Emily needed to leave.
And somewhere inside Emily Dickinson, something gave way.
Not bent.
Not cracked.
Shattered.
Spectacularly.
Huzzah
Boss Man saw it, when she asked permission to leave early.
For a long time Boss Man had described Emily as crazy.
Nuts.
Unstable.
He loved calling women crazy bitches. It resonated well with the men he talked to. They all agreed.
The problems of the world was because of CRAZY BITCHES!
Versions of those words had been repeated often enough on a cell phone through the walls that they had become part of the office furniture.
Emily’s eyes bothered him.
Emily’s mouth bothered him.
She noticed things.
She didn’t smile and laugh for him like the others.
This PISSED HIM OFF. The crazy bitch. He’d get her. He had a way of making people disappear! He bragged about it!
The worst was sometimes she said what she saw.
He replied, “I’ll handle it” but what he meant was, “I’m going to get rid of you.”
And now—
Here it was.
Evidence.
Not grief.
Not three years of accumulation.
Not the strange doors.
Not the note.
Not the security guard who declared himself an enemy in a war Emily had not known existed.
Not the screens.
Not the invisible territories.
Not the forbidden flyers Boss Man himself told her to hang.
Not the coffee hidden in attics or vans.
Not the cup with the tiny hole.
Not Rad.
Not Rod.
Not hundreds of little moments that meant almost nothing individually and something very different when placed beside one another.
No.
Emily Dickinson had shattered at a birthday party.
What could be clearer?
Crazy Emily.
Unstable Emily.
Poor Emily.
Boss Man had wanted rid of Emily’s eyes and mouth.
And now the gods had handed him something better than he could possibly have requested.
A spectacle.
A story.
Proof.
Huzzah.
The Letter
Afterward, there would be words.
There were always words at the Institute.
Words written down became especially powerful.
Once printed on official paper, they could transform events.
Three years could disappear inside a paragraph.
Context could evaporate.
Cause could become character.
Reaction could become evidence.
A broken person could become a defective person.
Eventually Emily would sit while somebody younger, somebody who had not been inside all those rooms, read an official version of Emily Dickinson back to her.
Emily listened.
It was strange hearing about herself.
Apparently she had been unstable.
Apparently she had been the problem.
Apparently everything was quite straightforward.
Outside the room, a screen continued cycling through announcements.
A meeting.
An event.
Something with the wrong date.
Then:
CURRENT CONDITIONS: MOSTLY CLEAR.
Emily almost laughed.
Because nothing had ever been clear inside the Institute.
That had been the trick.
The Institute was all glass.
All mirrors.
All lights.
Everything could be seen.
Everything could be reflected.
Everything could be illuminated.
And still nobody had to agree about what had happened.
Emily Dickinson had entered the Institute with a heart capable of carrying an astonishing amount of weight.
They kept placing things on it.
Some deliberately.
Some carelessly.
Some because nobody remembered who was responsible for putting them somewhere else.
And when at last the glass broke, they picked up one glittering piece and held it toward the light.
See?
They said.
It was broken all along.
Boss Man even after he was no longer boss sprinkled the glass pieces around. He wanted to make sure everyone had a piece of the crazy bitch he had dispatched and protected the community from. He was a hero.
Emily? Dickinson? Well, whoever that really was. She healed. She is healing. She realized that what she had been searching for—the institutes, the systems, the leaders, the mentors, all of it—was simply not meant for her. She was designated to be a wife, a mother, and a volunteer. Not an artist. Not a writer. Certainly not a county employee with benefits that could help her and her children. Certainly not someone with access to an institute that could help her children, help her, and then point to all of them and say: Look. This is what education can do. No. How dare she. She was supposed to smile and support all the systems already in place. Ironically, she had tried to do exactly that. But somewhere along the way someone decided she was the enemy. And people were cruel. It harmed her nervous system. No bruises. No broken bones. She had a nervous breakdown. Not because she had been defective all along. Because other people behaving badly were, once again, given authority without accountability. They got jealous. They got insecure. They projected. They gossiped. They constructed narratives. They cast her as Emily Dickinson. And, of course, grown adults would never behave this way. Surely it was all Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson and her ridiculous little glass heart, still trying to believe that people were mostly good. It’s been fucking real. Really fucking real.
To be continued…
And yes. I’ll leave my fucking three dots… right… here…
And honestly,
What... the… FUCK…
