Free write 16: Child

Being a child, what do I think of?  I think a lot about In Living Color, and how I always ate slowly on Sunday nights just so I could stay up and watch that show, and A tribe called quest and their CDs which I stole from my brother and sister, and I think of ice cream trucks that used to speed up just so neighborhood kids could run for them and they served soft serve ice cream and real sundae’s and there were spaghetti nights and Chinese food nights on Thursdays and movies Sundays in autumn because it was so cold to do anything else, and wedging myself between my brother and sister for warm when we ran out of blankets.  I think digable planets and common and run dmc, the time hip hop was fun and intellectual before it eroded into rap.  I think of a time when the greatest joy was to be home alone so I could put food coloring in everything, and take long baths and listening to the radio late at night so I could hear the quiet storm program, which there is now a station dedicated to it, which still doesn’t seem like the stuff of childhood because the fun was listening to it in bed and wondering…what went through other people’s minds when they turned to that station.

 I think a little bit of Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary.  Of Nancy Drew which I could never get into.  Of classes and field trips and the long walks where I carried bottles of water because I was scared to death of passing out.  Of taste of Chicago and fireworks, of swimming in the lake and being frightened if I touched a fish scale, of good times and reading my mother stories, of pouring through library books and encyclopedias to learn the mysteries of puberty, like, why did my chest itch so much?  And that was only manual that give me answers. 

 Often times I think of Zillions magazine and how I begged my father to get subscription to that, of soul food especially soul by the pound which does not exist anymore, or busting fire hydrants because we couldn’t go into the ymca swimming pool, or goofing around in the park or on the slide or slipping onto a fence.  Making my own outfits and my parents nicknaming me Blossom because of how bizarre they were.  Studying hard for standardized tests.  Sharing poems with my teachers because I knew my classmates would laugh at me.  Not knowing the difference between meet and meat for the longest time.  I don’t think much of playground games, but I do remember spending endless hours on the phone about silly things, like, she said what?  And not so silly hours talking to my dad about how things were in life.

 Part of me thinks I want to go back to childhood but the only was I can think of returning there is by having a child myself.  That way, I could se what the adult world looks like through their eyes, but I think that’s the wrong reason to have a kid.  I wonder if I trust as much, love as much, care as much as I did as a kid, and I think that I do. And strangely enough, I regret that part of me hasn’t matured to the best standard that there is now.  Maybe I miss everything being new and familiar at the same time, loving and cruel, understanding and misunderstanding at the same time and not knowing it.  Now I do, but all I’m left with is, what to do with all this experience?  Where do my sad, washed up, used up longings go?  Where can nostalgia be pure, and candied and bittersweet, besides, as nostalgia? Do they get returned, or matured, or saved for the next generation?  Perhaps they do, but mine are saying return to sender, return those useless feelings and let me hold on to my youth, my happy youth, my new youth, just for a second, for one more precious second before work, school, writing, the present invade my psyche with its momentous demands and precarious involvements.

Old Write Exercise: About Sefa

The first time I spoke to Sef, he said he was British but he didn’t have a British accent.  It was much like Abani’s British and something else.  Sef was from Ghana and he contacted me through a myspace search engine.  I’m still not sure why he began talking to me.  I don’t want to ask either.  My second reading week for London was slow so I called him and we spoke.  He was a third year business major at Nottingham and his parents paid for school so he didn’t work.  He was addicted to Chinese food.  His ex-girlfriend was Chinese.  Her name was Estella.  She left him for someone else.  The conversation revolved around her, even though he said he wanted to meet me.  I was bored.  I needed adventure, so I said yes.

I’m one of those people who needs busy work, because when I get bored I do stuff like what I’m about to tell you.  Anyway, we agreed to meet at Waterloo.  I had trouble spotting him, because I wasn’t too sure what he looked like.  We picked up our mobiles and I found him by the sound of his voice.  Still that same British-Ghanaian accent.  He was tall and slim, with skin the color of dark milk chocolate.  I was nervous, so I was glad that he did most of the talking.  He told me a bit about Ghana.  He was the youngest of three or four siblings.  His parents were wealthy.  Sef didn’t see an elephant, until he went to a zoo in Washington, and he hated telling people he was African because they assumed he ran with the elephants.  I never made the observation.  I tried to imagine myself on some exploration of eroticism with him.  I didn’t like him very much, but I figured it would make a great tale for Anita and Emma when they returned from Sicily.  But I didn’t tell him that.  I didn’t want to look like a slut or anything.  I touched his hand.  He winced.  I’d try again later.

London wasn’t his town he told me.  He didn’t spend much time there, but that was how he met his ex.  We were at Rendezvous in Leicester Square.  She passed him in the street.  They met again at Nottingham and flirted like butterflies around the idea of hooking up.  She was involved with someone else.  He stopped eating his Belgian waffle and almost said her name, which I found lovely and called her The Past.  The Past kept in contact with this guy while they were living together.  The Past had non sexual affairs in London hostels with him.  Sef checked her e-mail and called her parents to confirm his fears.  Then his cross-dressing became more frequent.  His favorite color was pink, and he hated admitting that.  He told me that over our phone conversation and I wore pink especially for him.  Anyway, he met a guy on myspace who was gay.  They met for drinks when The Past still endured her intimately wrong affair.  He slept with this guy, but it wasn’t an affair he said.  He wasn’t gay.  He didn’t come.  He wasn’t even a cross dresser.  He just liked dressing in girl’s clothes.  And he hated drag shows.  They were demeaning, but lesbians were great.  Such a typical male.  That’s what ended their relationship.  He assures me that The Past is missing out, even though she is back home in China.

We left Rendevous and I hoped we could leave The Past but she followed us everywhere.  A rose lady walked past us.  I got The Past a rose at this club, he said.  We sat on a bench and a placed my leg over his.  He pulled out a condom and sighed.  These things are like kryptonite, he said.  We watched a movie; I think it was Bullet Boy.  I slipped my arms over him.  He said I had soft skin.  The Past didn’t.  Sef took me to a Chinese restaurant where he ordered way too many courses.  He took my hand at the table.  I sighed.  I really like you, he said.  You’re like a sponge, so absorbent, he said.  He felt so comfortable with me.  While we were waiting on desert, he told me about his masturbation habits.  He’d wait for several days and do it five times.  It helped to release some pressure.  I tried one more time and caressed his arm.  I went to far listening to him to not do this.  He was upset with his roommate last summer and he jacked off on her favorite dress before she went back to France.  He felt a relief, after so many months of being without The Past.  He felt close to a woman for once, he said.

I looked down at my ice cream and sighed.  At least I got a free meal.   

                                                                                                                     

Free Write 15: Pain

I cut myself last night, messing around with a Y peeler, because I bought one, because I wanted to make roasted potatoes because I love potatoes but I hate peeling them, and I figured, a Y peeler is safe because I won’t have to worry about cutting myself, like I often did with a knife whenever I was cutting potatoes, or tomatoes, or butternut squash or sharing carrots.  Perhaps my knives have gotten dull but I’ve never cut myself once, ever and then while I was in the midst of listening to Keyshia Cole I put my thumb wide open.  Like, there is blood everywhere, my red potatoes died pink, pink smeared into the water.  I am so accident prone with things that are supposed to be safe for me, things that are good for me.  I fell down while running a few weeks ago, all in the middle of trying to focus, trying to breathe, trying to envision how great I’ll look when there’ll be a lot less of me, but no, I fall and luckily it’s so early in the morning that no one else sees me.  So now I have scars, sublte ones on my knees to match the scars I got while hiking in Utah, and I ate coming downhill, right next to the scar I received while rollerskating in grade school and I fell down and ate it too.  I have other scars on my knees from a shaving accident gone wrong; taking things out of the over and burning myself; times when I’ve scratched too much and there wasn’t enough cocoa butter or fading cream in the world to get rid of them, but they are still there.  I wish that I had used more free time doing other things, although no of these scars burned until I put peroxide on them.  Take a lesson from dad:  always use peroxide because it brought air to the cut, helped it heal faster.  I wish I had heeded this lesson long ago.  I keep doing the same things that I know could bring me pain but I am always surprised, always shocked but the gush that peroxide can bring.  But I need otherwise my scars won’t heal as quickly.  It needs to be handy in my life.

 

But what about those other scars, that other pain?  The pshyical pain used to not bother me:  just the evidence, but now the emotional pain bugs me even more.  Those are scars that don’t heal and there’s no peroxide to the heart that I can take.  I don’t know how to let those scars heal, let that pain heal because when it raises to the top it hurts and when I bury it, it hurts and the only way to really let it go to have some distance, from space, and even in that space I have to be conscious to not let ot go and raise to the top where it wants to.  Sometimes I just want someone to cook for, talk to, someone who will hold me…and just I feel ashamed for having such trite desires that no one will seem to fulfill.  There’s also pain in wondering if I will ever be happy being with someone and if I can only be happy alone, can I be okay with it?  Can I laugh just as I did when I fell while running or hiking or rollerblading?  Why can’t I find the beauty of the pink, the emotional pain or rejected love just as I can when my blood gets on potatoes, perhaps because I can wash it, I have a solution so I know that pain is temporary and it’ll only leave a scar that I can later on show to friends and family and laugh about this one time when I blah blah blah, and how I got through it because I know what I was doing.  I know who I am in those moments.