My Twenties
by Michael Juliani

The year I turned twenty, I shared a cramped off-campus apartment with three strangers on Jefferson Boulevard. L.A. experienced what was, at that time, its hottest recorded temperature: 118 degrees. Classes were cancelled. I tried smoking a cigarette on our balcony and nearly passed out. After graduation, I moved to New York, seeing snowfall for the first time at 23. On a pitch-black January night, a few of us snuck into the computer lab in Dodge Hall to drink and listen to music, and when we left after midnight a blizzard had encroached without warning. We threw plastic bottles of whiskey at each other, losing them in the snow. In New York, I felt temperatures hovering near zero. I woke up in a village called Rensselaerville, a family of deer prodding in the white yard, and felt the northeastern tranquility that I had only ever inferred from the work of poets in the Norton Anthology.