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.