My mother plays the lottery. If ever there was a sentence that summed up the beautiful and damning things about my upbringing, there it is.

I want to understand her. I want to know what is behind her religion and her blind optimism, how it came that one is so much a part of me and one is not.

I can see decades frittered away, a couple dollars at a time, without anything to show but a hope that maybe it'll work out better next time. I wonder how many times those thoughts have applied to me.

I guess as it stands right now, my mother plays the lottery and  I pay for the tickets and I wonder if it's rent I feel I have to pay because I'm nothing like her. Our noses and our thumbs and our smiles, a likeness of bone and muscle, our voices sound so much alike on the phone. But my mother plays the lottery and I can't imagine betting and gambling hopes like that.

I guess, tho, people are my lottery. Right now, I'm planning to get a tattoo with a girl with whom I am developing a list of topics we can't discuss. The closest thing I have to a sister loaned me money that I dread her asking me to pay back. My best friend and closest partner is a man who has a decade of saying I love you to a woman who isn't me. And I'm worried I made a suit of pretty clothes for someone I barely know and I'll expect them to wear them to finally live out my little Gone with the Wind fantasy.

So my mother plays the lottery. I bet my heart and soul on people who could leave or not love me back or could tear me apart. We all do things that seem insane from the outside.

These are the kind of days I memorized all that poetry for, the ones where all I can do is repeat the lines to make my brain realign itself, like a diagnostic.

Maybe it keeps the panic at bay, but it makes me make less and less sense as I keep my thoughts in the echoes.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 

As a coping mechanism, reciting verse about suicides and solipsists is an interesting choice. Maybe it's why when I write about my illness, I call it the crashing of the waves. I want to be covered in words, maybe it makes sense to try to drown out my mind with them. My kind of sense, anyway.

I lift my lids and all is born again.

I always feel like maybe the right combination of words in the right order can make it stop. After all, it was words combined in a certain order that kicked it off in the first place. I have to make the beauty echo louder than the pain, I guess, and I just don't have the volume right now.

I think I made you up inside my head.

That might be my fault, too. Other choices keeping me short of breath. I keep seeing things about cigarettes being passive suicide and I guess you can only claim to thumb your nose at death so much before every gesture becomes flirtation, before you wonder if you're just using the wrong finger to pretend you're not beckoning.

Maybe you're not fooling anyone but yourself. Maybe not even then.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

But dammit, echoes, alone and palely loitering, have nothing to do with the end goal. The end goal isn't the verse or the shortness of breath. It's a tactile, tangible, intangible, contradictory, impossible thing to make the echoes that hurt stop.

I lift my lids and all is born again. 

Maybe if I hadn't spent so long apologising for everything else, I wouldn't feel the need to apologise for whatever tricks I use to stay alive. If chiaroscuro coping mechanisms take me back to the light, if dipping into the dark is what it takes, maybe I am not sorry after all. Maybe I am never sorry.

I think I made you up inside my head.

I guess that's what I have. I am not sorry. I am coping. I don't ever have to feel like I am sorry for staying alive. I don't have to feel bad that I have a mantra of beauty and bad habits that I use as armor. Maybe, some day, I will find a better way. But so far, the answer comes back like the waves to the shore, every time I need to call.
I am not sorry.

I want forever.

I wanted forever before my brain could even begin to perceive it. I guess I still can't, but I am closer now. A car ride doesn't take forever, but waiting for test results can. Or a text message. Or to fall asleep.

I want forever in this really obvious way, like a bright top with matching shoes. Like genetics. Like death, like loss turned inside out. It can't fix anything, it can't solve anything, but I want it the way I want everything, more. More. More. Waves and waves like the ocean I fear and love at the same time.

I mean, granted, I don't want to turn into a tree, oak or linden, a bird to sing the things I couldn't speak, or turn to stone to have this, but there's days where I think that at least would still the ache. I don't want it to transform me, but maybe it will.

I want it in the way I want a million things, in a way that makes me wonder if I am missing the point. It doesn't make me want it any less. It seems silly to want something so inevitable. It makes me wonder if I am coming at it all wrong. It makes me wonder if I will ever really get it.

For years his passions had been like a nerve that the world jarred on; now at last the aching was soothed, and he could yield himself to love that was neither a torment nor a bore.

Butterflies

I guess that's how it always starts.
A little twitch in your stomach and you know, just know, something new has started.
It feels like a miracle.
I guess the issue is that I don't know what to do when it stops.
How does this happen?
Is it a coldness? Is it guilt? Is it intention or carelessness?
I look back at the trail of broken things behind me and I wonder... is my heart such an infertile ground as this? Is it me?
That trail is beauty, pain, and memory, a few choices mixed in for good measure. Is this this how it will always be?
It all unfolds and it feels inevitable and a little unreal.
But it is real. And you know.
In your bones... in your heart.
You can feel it in your stomach.

a gift, maybe.

The last memory I have of my grandmother is holding her while the cancer took away her body and the morphine took away her brain. Maybe reverse that. Maybe this isn't true but it's the last memory I will think about.

High dose liquid painkillers don't end the pain, if you ever wondered. They turn your day and night inside out, so 4 am is your afternoon tea, even if you can't keep it down. Even if nothing at that point could keep anything down. But yeah, those painhiders: they shove the reality to the side and present you with a mountebank smile to distract. Better living through chemistry based on a domino effect of synthesized neural reactions that cause illusions. They make pain less important than the pretty sounds and colors. It doesn't matter that it isn't real. Maybe none of it matters at the end of the day. Or the middle of the night. It's what you need.

It's more than 3 months later. It still doesn't matter that it isn't real. I wake up straining to hear my name at 1, 2, 3 am. I worry that she needs me. She needs the messy version of who the chemicals told her that I was, the gnat, her twisty little bug, to hold her down to this earth. Or maybe to help let her down gently, to help her let go. A part of me will never let go and will always be straining to hear her ask for me in the dark. I can't say I really mind. Maybe.

Most days, the reality that I want to set to the side is that she gave me this huge gift. I read somewhere once some advice: "Some day, someone you love is going to die. Then you'll realise none of this matters." Maybe that was the gift. Maybe it's that she is helping me break free of this cycle of debt, from this job, from this life that I am trying so hard to make work that is breaking me down, piece by piece, without the benefit of medicinal sleight of hand to take my mind off of it. At least I know it doesn't matter.

But all the electrical impulses and axons and dendrites and misfires in all the world cannot push reality aside enough. And the reality is, every single damn day, I would give anything to have this gift taken away and have it/they/Whomever give her back to me. No matter the cost. At almost the height of his ecstacy, I'm sure Icarus regretted the gift of his wings. If I fly close enough to the sun, I can melt away this freedom and dip back into the ocean, where I belong. But wait. Maybe that's what's not real. Maybe that's the symptom. Because underneath this false shelter of nihilism, in this pain, it's that she was ever here at all. It's this gift that makes me fireproof and lovable and unstoppable. It's this gift that lets me give and give and that let me hold her, and care for her, and protect her dignity, that showed me that I can do these things. That I can give and never break.

So, maybe the gift is that she loved me and that little feather in my cap was the source of my strength all along, Dumbo. Or maybe it's that I could love her, without condition, without question, to the bottom of my soul. Maybe it's the simplest thing in the goddamn world and all these chemicals and emotions and synapses bumping along together just managed to achieve creation of something better. Of a life and a strength and a legacy. Maybe I can use this and make her so damn proud.

Because at the end of the day, maybe I don't need to mask a damn thing, because this is all that matters.

Dracarys

I've been asking for a week, but I guess now the problem looks real enough to address.

See, there's your problem--you were missing a device driver.

I mean, had you asked me, at any time, if something fundamental was left out of my make up, I could've absolutely told you that was true.

It's the question I whisper to myself, when things go bad, what is fundamentally wrong with you that you can't....?

But thing is. I can.
There is nothing wrong with me and I will never fall into that trap again.

This isn't just about the printer or the job or the implications. This isn't just about the times at night when the fans aren't enough and I tell myself that I am the blood of the dragon.

This is how I thought I was a phoenix, to live and die again, never destroyed but charred to ash. I am not a phoenix reborn. I am the blood of the dragon. Fire only burns away that which is not essential. Fire cannot kill a dragon.

I am in my car, ignoring the deadlines and the bells and alarms in my head, in a polka dot dress, with a can-do attitude, yesterday's hair, my grandmother's underwear, a string of hearts I feel connected to me. I am centering and I am working so hard. I will burn to the ground anyone who dares question me.

I am the blood of the dragon. I must be strong. I must have fire in my eyes when I face them, not tears.

I will never settle for less again.

On the Subject of Willem Dafoe's Confusingly Large Peen

It doesn't matter how self aware or honest you are.

At some point, in some way, someone is going to surprise you. It could be great--an unexpected call from a friend, a gift.

But then there's the things that lie beneath, that you never expect to see the light of day. These are the things that are these tremulous revelations, humbling you, sometimes to the ground, sometimes to the skies. They're these seismic shifts that you ABSOLUTELY see coming, but only from the benefit of hindsight... they're, concisely, confusingly large.

Willem Dafoe, apparently, is packing one of these kind of surprises. Lars Von Trier chose to drop this bomb, almost flippantly, about the result of Dafoe droppin' trou during some random interview.

The phrase confusingly large absolutely strikes a certain chord, emotionally. I invite you to google this so you can experience the reality for yourself, but just remember there are certain things you just can't unsee.

The revelation takes some adjustment, no doubt. It takes some time. It could take everything and turn it flipped, upside down. Sometimes there really is a demigorgon waiting. And sometimes, I swear to you, it is the best damn thing.

I'm not gonna pretend it isn't painful. I'm not gonna pretend it doesn't hurt. I'm not going to sit here and blow smoke up your ass and tell you that having a dream built on a foundation of half truth torn down around me wasn't a profound experience, and a life-changing one.  I am kind of caught between believing that I will never trust zipped lips or zipped pants or a zipped-up heart again and feeling so free and being nothing but grateful for the sting. It feels cleansing, it feels a little like redemption. Like cleaning a wound. It also feels like loss,but in a hopeful way. Like Michaelangelo says, he chipped away all the stone that was not David. I guess I wonder how the stone felt. Maybe I shouldn't anthropomorphise everything.

Anyway, given the choice, I always want to know, for better or for worse, like the promise I was so ready to make. And while it would have been a promise I would have endeavoured to keep, come hell, or high water, it's so much better that the bulging secret from beneath came out, in full technicolor horror, inescapable. It lingers, forcing you to confront the reality. That's the way of these things, I guess--be it genitals or the truth, it's confusingly large and alters your reality.

Maybe that's how it should be--maybe it has to be something you can't get out of your mind. Because some people absolutely prefer that things stay strapped in and hidden. I guess that's one way to live. But I, for one, would absolutely rather get down on my knees and stare the monster in the eye.

High tide

I let the sea foam claim me when I am hollow. I let the sea foam claim me when my bones feel empty and alone, when they are husks and all I feel inside are caves and grottos echoing with the waves' crash. I don't need seashells to my ear to hear the sound of the surf. It finds me. It finds me in moments I am trying to be very very still and reminds me that it need not move me or take me, that the knives I walk on day to day are part of the bargain, part of who I was born to be, and that in that even when the tide goes out, I am part of the spray, part of the salt, like the shark, the seaweed, the siren, and the sailor, I could not be anywhere, were I not here. Because even if I leave, this is what I always see. The tide always finds me. I let the sea foam claim me because it hurts not to, because the sting of the wind is nothing compared to when I try to leave the water behind and the sand burns and everything I am starts to disappear, drowning on dry land and nobody can tell its only bubbles that come out when I try to speak. I let the sea foam claim me in my quiet moments because it is my home. I let the sea foam claim me because it cannot do otherwise. I let the sea foam claim me because it means the tide is coming in. And high tide, caught in the swell, and the movement, and the potential, is the only place I feel at peace.

I am not the right color to be called out on my white privilege but I guess I am ripe to be called out in all the ways that matter. Can you appropriate white guilt? Am I, as I have long suspected, doing this wrong?

I do not share the pain of the immigrants' child. My family has been here for so long that we barely talk about where we used to live--I'm pretty sure it's lost to memory. I grew up on The Simpsons, stolen moments of Married with Children, late at night. Star Wars, Ecto Cooler, Domino's pizza, Ray Bradbury, MTV, and TGIF. 90s black comedies and all white sitcoms with laugh tracks and, only in the background, during commercials, the occasional arguments and epithets in Spanish. The Old Country was Herman's Hermits and Nick at Nite.

But I know what it is to be caught between 2 worlds. The shame of looking older relatives in the face and not understanding what they say--or worse, understanding and being unable to respond in that tongue. The frustration of being told that you're a bad Mexican, when you aren't a Mexican at all. Or maybe you are and it just isn't the part that everyone who defined your heritage to you wears on the surface. Being assumed to be part of a culture and having that be the focus of your achievements.

You don't look like everyone else in the gifted and talented program; I hope you're going to college.

They said that to me, the granddaughter of multiple degrees where a Ph. D was the obvious choice, raised in a household of readers, Jeopardy! a competition you couldn't refuse. Because of the color of my skin and the chip on my shoulder, sly, witty retorts are my native tongue but I always answered these questions politely in the lingua franca of How to Get Ahead. Because of where I am from, I learned the language of classism by immersion, well before I learned una palabra del espanol, but as my tio can attest, I never learned how to respond. Hang on a second. Did I spell that right? If I am honest, I hear the phrase spoken the way the line is from Men in Black, or said aloud in Ricky Ricardo's accent.
Forgive me. I digress.

Even here, I confuse pop culture and lessons from history books with a heritage. Even here, I don't know where I fit. I look like a model minority, I guess (this here, this phrase, again with the appropriation). But. I look safe. Safe enough to question. Safe enough to project upon.

Where are you from?

I say, Colorado and am not believed. I say I am American and am met with doubt. I say I was born here and I am met with question after question about my parents, my grandparents. I'm held accountable for relatives I never met, maybe because they want to know if we came here "the right way." Maybe because they like the way my brown features don't look like theirs. Maybe they just think it's cosmopolitan and hip to make chitchat with hourly wage employees who can't walk away from the conversation. It seems to be a way to flaunt their virtues, to congratulate themselves, a victory celebration for the questioners.

I am open-minded; I thought you were Muslim. I thought you were Indian, or Native American, what's the difference, haha. Why won't you smoke a peace pipe with me as a celebration of my assumptions and conversation?

I guess all that time I spent studying math and geography and science and art would have been better served on genealogy. The question of my heritage is writ large in a lifelong pop quiz from skeptical strangers, acquaintences, even friends.

What are you? 

What I am, I guess, is open to interpretation. Often, I am fetishized and rewritten by racists, who have always been drawn to me by my exotic skin and utter lack of accent as I quote movies they love and books they aspire to read. I am inexplicably ethnically generic enough to not pose a threat to their principles and standards.

But I don't think of you as not white.

This phrase becomes a staple of my friendships, even playing a part in the people I date. It is a compliment. The little coconut girl: she's actually white on the inside.

I'm into it; I only date brown girls.
I only date white guys.
I'm sorry, I don't date black men.

These statements shame me to the ground, now. Now that I understand the meanings behind them and the ignorance and the motivation and goddammit, the weight of years and history. Intentional or not, what I used to take as regular valid opinion looks a lot different from this side. Is this what being 'woke' is? Do I want to use that phrase? Again with the appropriation.

I wonder if those boys wanted something they didn't find in my skin, an ideal they thought was buried under the melanin but all they found was a person and it's why it went so poorly. I wonder how the hell I could be so blind to the meaning behind a phrase I heard 'everywhere' those days. How I could use that against a person without seeing it as a weapon? How fucked up was my romantic and interpersonal life that "I'm just not into you romantically" was less acceptable and hurtful than THAT, that garbage, that vitriol, that stupidity.

Maybe this is what I have confused for heritage, more than Monty Python. Maybe it's this shame. I worried once that my genes would keep my kids from having the pretty green eyes their potential father had. I wore blue contact lenses. None of my heroes looked like me. The books I read, fumbling to create a bridge, were things I couldn't relate to, storylines I felt awkward about because I wasn't Hispanic enough. I didn't have an abuela, I had a gammy. I was 29 the first time I ate tamales from a sample cup at the fancy grocery store. I didn't have these essential markers to define me. I couldn't seek them or create them. Because I do not fit. Nevermind that I do not want to fit one mold. Because the lessons I learned about being Hispanic and mixed and unidentifiable were about fighting to not be held back.

About people looking down on you, watching you. About people calling you slurs while you buy cookies because they can't tell "What" you are and that's a threat, apparently. About having to look back and teach yourself about the worries and heartache your heritage is built upon. About separating the blame for these from your own feelings about your culture and building a history of avoiding any action that could push you further under scrutiny for your brownness.

Inevitably, it's about the dichotomy between who you see in the mirror vs how you see yourself through a filter of all the expectations you never asked to be subjected to within your daily. You have to sort through all the layers to get to the truth, underneath. You have to grow to the skies, work within the woke and the layers and the weight. I'll give you some spoilers, though: under all the subtext, the overt missives, it was pretty much just you all along.

Advanced Best Friend Break Up

I'm putting something that I never completely tamed into storage because it hurts too much to stare it in the face and it's mortallywoundedbutnotdead. Like, it could still hurt me, badly. Like, some days, like yesterday, there's some moments where I feel like it might kill me.

Maybe it isn't storage. Maybe I have to put it down, like an ailing pet.  Maybe it's just ending the suffering. Maybe that's why it hurts so badly to take it apart. Because, for sure, this dismemberment feels more like a vivisection of myself, and to be honest, I only like to do that to make sure I am still tender enought to feel the pain. As a necessity, it sucks.

And, sure, I like to keep the mounted heads of my dead relationships within easy touring distance but I have never been a DIY taxidermist. I let time and memory take care of that and later, I pull out the lion's skin that is The Stories and wear it like a mantle, like a trophy of That Time I Survived My Own Choices and throw myself a little tickertape parade whenever I feel closed in and sad. Or happy. Or brave.

I digress.

This mercy killing is to keep it from recovering and going feral and changing who I am and changing love into something as dirty and small and unhappy and soiled as it feels now. When I look at the sad pile of parts that will be left, I will feel like a murderer, not a survivor. Doesn't mean I can stop.

But yeah, anyway, it isn't easy, pinning down, dismantling, and unpacking a decade of love and loyalty. It isn't easy taking a whole human person that you know and making them into a stranger. An acquaintance to whom you owe nothing but manners and niceness. I'm not very good at being nice. I am very good at being loyal but that was kinda the lightning bolt catalyst, so it's nothing to brag about. Makes me wish I were nicer, a thing I never wish. Maybe I wouldn't be in this situation. If I were nicer.

It's even worse when they have no idea what you're feeling, because they never knew, really. And you have to realize that and unpick the stitches in places you sewed together wounds and patched tears with excuses you made for bad behaviour and justification for ignorance and feel stupid for the energy you spent.

I'll just say it plainly, ugly as the butchery I am engaging in: she picked him, not me. She picked her own perspective, not me. She picked the warm immediate gratification of whispering secrets and creating intimacy with someone else's story, not me. Maybe it was knowingly illicit and maybe just because it was a Person to Trust and that behaves like a pair of blinders. It doesn't matter.

I get to be righteously angry and feel betrayed that her quivering and fuzzy feefees for some quasi stranger meant more to her than 10 damn years of being humans together in the most chaotic visceral challenging ugly silly ways. It doesn't help much. It doesn't stop the salty tears, constantly flowing, like the ocean, and I wonder if there could ever be enough of either to help my hands or my heart feel clean again.

I am angry that people don't treat this the way they do any other break up. When I was going crazy for information about any ex, when I wanted to KNOW, just tell me, because it would make me feel better, people treated me like what I was: an addict, looking for a fix. They would advise that what I was doing was unhealthy.

That never once stopped me. But maybe because I was working with a net and a harness and EMTs standing by with bandaids and shots and dance parties--I knew they saw me exhibiting absurd behaviours and would only let me fall so far.

They don't do that when it's just a friend and you're trying to unsolder them from your soul. They offer these bits freely: it's just a taste, it doesn't cost you anything.
There's no net between you and that churning well of loss and a free fall into the water is like a fall into concrete from this height, even the people who try to comfort you and ask if you're OK don't know whether or not to believe you're actually done.

Because you will forgive her, because that's what you do. Because you need to just talk about it because you just should know because they're used to telling you, because they can't see that you feel like the creature gasping for air you always talk about being and you're in the waves and gravity is supposed to be neutral and meaningless but you can feel the drop and realize that maybe there was a net after all and you're caught in it and that's why you're drowning this time.

She's acting like such a poser. I never liked her and she put this on Facebook the other day and I am so glad I can finally tell you how stupid I think she is.

-you would not have dared say that to me when our friendship was alive and wild and a thing I fiercely nurtured, why would you say that to me now.-

Why is she getting all these tattoos all of sudden? Who does she think she is?

-the exact same person she always was; why does it matter to you?-

She's smoking weed all the time now.

-it was hard enough to watch her Batesian attempts to match the people she wanted to please when i wasn't trying to cut out a part of myself. i don't need to know, thank you.-

Has she fucked that guy she's always tagging on Facebook yet?

-no words here, just burst into tears.-

Stop.
Take a breath. Close your eyes. Find your center.

Now take that next step on the balance beam or the tight rope or the metaphor. Ready? Ok.

You are not killing something healthy and vibrant. You are cutting away a chimera of graveyard parts and optimism and pity and choices that long ago overtook anything organic and living. Nothing wants to die but there is a time to ev'ry purpose under Heaven. There's still love, hidden under all the ugly bits and pieces you're going to grind into meal, into nothing, into sand, and nobody can take that from you. All the bits you throw away? The waves will wear them down until all that's left is the sound of the crash and a memory.

So take that next step and the next cut. Even if you plummet down end over end, you don't need to worry about a net because the waves and the sky are your homes, equally, in different ways. In your bones, you know you are a bird and a fish and a beating heart and enough. This is just a forced perspective illusion built by pain and the mad science behind a soft and well-meaning thesis predicated on the idea no one should be alone and you could fix that. All the donated parts in the world could not make this happen. And so now, mourn. And then lay it to rest.