It is 1982. I just turned 14 last month. It is the summer before 10th grade. I am at a sleepaway camp in the Catskills. I am staying in what used to be a hotel that the camp randomly assigns to campers. It’s not fancy, but it’s better than the cabins. It’s really cool because I am with a group of girls from Long Island. It’s like they are a gang of Rizzos from Grease.
I love referring to my surgery as a boob job because it makes people do a double-take. I see them recalibrate, “What kind of gay are you? Where are you coming from and where are you going?”
Ms. Zeller told us, “if you scrunch all your fingers and toes and hold it for about ten seconds and then release, that’s kind of what an orgasm feels like.” Glancing down I saw twenty pairs of feet, all wearing the same green knee high socks and black shoes, lift slightly off the floor as we all clenched our toes.
When a people are made into numbers, by nature, they become divisible. By design, subtractable.
But you cannot pick around home. Maybe your home, but not my home. I can throw the doors wide–and often do so with open arms–but to refuse a beam–whether it be a corpulent bird or a hi hat trill–is to cripple such a font to its foundation. For it comes from the depths of my soul, indivisible and not mine, but inherited slowly over time with no recipe to speak of, only a dance rediscovered over and over with folkish steps, a memory recognized when lived out with abandon. I cannot choose what bubbles up from this stew.
I feel like Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when he is struck by the Seurat painting, except there’s no John Hughes movie soundtrack in the back, and I fail to fall into the painting the way Cameron does. The pressure to discern meaning increases when other people are nearby. I’m afraid that they see something I can’t.
As I write this, my tastebuds pucker, saliva gathers greedily at the inside corners of my cheeks. In my mind, I see the almost hysterical orange-red color, the slightly greasy surface of Catalina as it oozes out of the little round hole in the white plastic bottle cap. Catalina is a gift my mother gave me before I left home to raise myself at 13 years old and, though it may seem strange, I don’t regret this gift.
I daydream a lot about floating in the air. A slow, sort of dead man’s float across the sky. This doesn’t make much sense to me because I don’t like planes. Or swimming. I prefer concrete over carpet. Analysis over meditation. So, the floating in the air thing—well that is a little crazy. A contradiction to my nature that feels oddly good.
“Addiction is all or nothing thinking,” my father told me, “like your battle with depression. You either pull yourself together or completely succumb to the sadness, never leaving your bed. All or nothing thinking, the hardest and most manipulating kind of reasoning.”
I am often asked why I don’t drink. Everyone asks me: people in Pakistan and people in countries that are not Pakistan. I like to joke that I do drink—water, lemonade, coffee, chai. If I didn’t drink, I would likely die. No one ever wants to know why I don’t drink carrot juice or why I don’t eat hard-boiled eggs, but it is of utmost importance for them to know why I don’t drink alcohol.
Is this how it ends? Does she have my face? Am I gonna die? Why is it that a simple thing like going to get food and trying to eat healthy spirals into something where I don’t feel safe? Cops could be involved.
I don’t know what to do about these ethical moral dilemmas. I don’t know how to decide if my anger should be placed deeper on the Black men I share skin with, or the white women I share gender with, or even the white gays I share queerness with. Or anyone in between with oppression commonalities.
107 miles. Sometimes I walk further downtown and the distance increases, sometimes I walk uptown and the distance shrinks. But, that’s only a measurement. It doesn’t matter where I am, there is always a distance between us. Even when I visit you.
These transgressions are the fibers that weave together the quilt of patriarchy.
We transition, at last, to the crux. Talk of putting her to sleep; when to make that decision, when quality of life moves on to dignity of death.
Even a lightbulb signifies positive change. Now, I try to remember the negative. What’s the opposite of a lightbulb going off above my head? Dim? Dim-witted? It means the less light there is—the less whiteness that exists—the worse we’re deemed to be.
I Today’s my last day in California, and as if some kind of twisted joke, it is especially glorious, a day spent wrapped in the arms of comfort, my name light in the air as […]
When I want to know more about him, I read the words that shot fists into the air.
I get manic when people turn sex education into something it is not.
