notageek

Four years of high school; 1.2 remaining of undergraduate education; 4 of professional school and an endless string of continuing education. Put off your life; put off your relationships, your amusements and your independence. Do not eat, sleep or breathe until you have finished your homework, and run–run scared, because while the end will come up fast in front of you, the threat of failure looms closer behind.

I am waiting–until I finish school; until I can live with my boyfriend; until I finish my second degree; until I am Old Enough for whatever next arbitrary age limit bestows upon me. I am waiting, waiting, waiting, for my life to begin. When it does, will I notice?

comes a time when all the seasons of your mind fall off in layers
like an overripe peach
the last slipping wetly over each, the detritus of a life in a crumpled heap
and like that faintly musting yellow flesh seeps juice
you cannot stop your thoughts from leaking

no ecstatic explosion of words
no erratic infinity of ideas, angles, forms

just what has filtered through your head’s cell fibers
dripping
dripping
sweetly staining the page.

I don’t know if it’s a USian thing, or a Left Coast thing, or a university-town thing, or what, but one of the things you Don’t Do is talk about money, beyond who’s chipping in for the pizza or how OUS screwed you on your loans this year. You just don’t.

If you’ve got it, it’s not that you don’t communicate that fact; everyone knows, because you probably signal it very clearly. You just don’t say it out loud. Since my parents are pretty comfy, it took me a long time to figure out that not everyone was as comfortable/spoiled as my family, that my mom was actually fucking poor as a child, that my dad’s parents were, relatively speaking, rolling in it. They started out in a house without running water and ended up putting my dad through medical school as without batting an eye.

Ok, well, they’re dead now. My grandmother died last spring, and we all went back to Indiana and bristled at my dad’s family’s Christian-centric, ethnically insensitive comments, and bounced all the pretty white babies on our knees. Now that the Florida lawyer-vultures have finished with the carcass of her estate, I have probably the biggest cheque ever specifically made out to me. My grandmother had 21 grandchildren, and we all got the same.

Mostly I feel guilty that I don’t really know my dad’s family, and awed of the fact that I haven’t deposited the cheque yet, although I’ve been at school all week.

All I really had to do was show up in the world and hold out the 20-odd years until my poor unloved but well-intentioned grandmother kicked the bucket. I feel bad, but I also feel an obligation to do right by her memory. The obvious conclusion is summer school.

who and where you come from are now irrelevant
because you do not really know where
because you do not really know who

because you do not even really know who you are now,
it is useless to you to know who else you could have been
based on the lives of people you could not have known

and it is useless to you to ask me
who i am
what i am
where i’m from
(california)

it is useless to me as well.

it is useless for you to ask these questions of yourself
but perhaps you have never tried, because you thought you already knew the answers

because the origin of the woman who squeezed my grandmother out between her thighs
because the upbringing of the men who dicked my grandmothers
does not change the fact that you are insulting me

because the fact that you could talk to your grandparents and think they understood you
that you think you understood them
does not change who you are
does not change what you have become
that is:

the smug white person
asking just where on the ladder
the person of colour is standing.

From me, no wisdom, no youth, no issue; I have my own. I am not cast, not your type, lacking in scalability. Words do not overflow from my fingers, nor images from my head. Joy does not bust through me in an equinox deluge of fertile throbbing.

I am cold and taut. What pours from me is grief and despair, and occasionally hope. What makes it to the keyboard is no outpouring of raw images and emotions, but what I have considered already through a hundred indecisions, a hundred visions and revisions.

In other words, I am fairly good at making things up. Whether normal is a default state or an assumed identity for most people, I am fairly good at its mimicry. When I open my mouth and something not-normal–a wad of science or family history–falls out, I, too, am surprised.

So I could say, yes, that the scent of spring is sweet and viscous on the air, and the cherry blossoms make a huge contortion of pink ruffles and the sun shines outside the library and the lawns are starting to dry out and the trees are budding out like sprays of beads and parsley, but that’s not surprising. It’s spring.

And I am crinkled pink and cannot stop crying.

Word of the day: amphiprotic