Goldfish

I think I was four years old. For my birthday, two different people gave me the same action figure. My family decided to test me. You know those experiments they run to see how long it takes for the child to eat the candy on the table? They told me that they’d exchange one of the action figures for a different one if I didn’t open them both. Of course, I was a small child. The point of the experiment is how long it takes the child to take the candy—not whether or not they’ll take the candy. They scolded me and told me that they wouldn’t exchange the action figure. (Of course, they obviously could’ve still exchanged it.) I cried and said it was unfair. I got angry, and I threw the action figure onto the roof.

A few years later, one of my little sisters went with my father to some sort of carnival. They won a goldfish. The goldfish came in a plastic baggie. We moved it into a little empty glass fishbowl. We kids were all excited about the fish. We fed and fed and fed the goldfish, so it died. In the morning, we encountered a cloudy fishbowl with an upside-down goldfish floating at the top. We all cried. It was unfair. For some reason, we decided that the thing to do was to pulverize any trace of the fish in the garbage disposal. Maybe we all said a Hail Mary. We asked our parents to get us another goldfish. They’re cheap, right? We already had a fishbowl. They refused.

Around the same time, our black and white cocker spaniel had a litter of puppies. They’d been growing for a few weeks. One night, around dusk, the puppies were playing in the garage and in the driveway as it extended out toward the street. Our parents told us it was time to go inside from playing. I dribbled a basketball, while my father yelled from the end of the driveway to my sister who was in the garage: “Close the garage door!” She pressed the button. I could see the problem: one puppy was bounding toward the inside of the garage. At first, I was calmer. Finally, I was yelling at her to stop the garage door. She couldn’t make out what I was saying. I pointed at the puppy, and she realized the tragedy that was unfolding. She pressed the button again, just as the door was coming down on the tiny puppy’s neck. My father scooped up the convulsing puppy and told my sister to come with him. I was wailing, my face covered in streams of tears. They took the puppy to bury it in a wooded area at the end of the street, but they told me that they’d taken the puppy to a veterinarian and that the puppy would be fine. I didn’t find out until years later. The puppy had a name, but I’ve forgotten what it was.

Dilemmas

I met my friend from Turkey to attend this philosophical cinetalk with the director and some philosophers. Two short, kind of postmodernist films. On the way, my friend had been mad at me.

            I’d left the apartment, and she’d called my name. I saw her. She looked beautiful in the twilight—she wore a black, sleeveless top and an olive skirt down past her knee—but she was angry. “Do you have an explanation?” I could tell she was frustrated.

“Explanation of what? For what?” She was mad because, due to lack of time, bad coordination, and lack of communication, she’d had to wait. We’d sort of resolved it before the talk.

At the talk, the main interlocutor seemed confused about the films, but he was trying to be generous. I raised my hand. I tried to point out that the director’s films seemed to advocate for getting rid of language, but I don’t think that I made the point clear. The professor I’d been trying to impress seemed to maybe be trying to defend him? Hard to say, though.

            My friend and I walked around the lush, floral campus, but it was dark by that point. We couldn’t really see the sea anymore. Damn. She pointed out that the light grey, futuristic brutalist concrete spaceship-building didn’t belong between the old academic buildings with their Middle Eastern motifs. Also, because the building was top-heavy, it wouldn’t do well in an earthquake. “Pyramids are perfect for earthquakes.” The Egyptians win again.

            We went to eat shawarma. The toum was good. We had tea. When in Rome (anyway, she’s Turkish). As we walked down Hamra Street, with its little warm lights, the regular carhorns, the shops, the hijabs, I told her I was sorry about earlier. I explained that I’ve recently earned secure attachment, but even though I no longer take things personally as I once did, getting rid of old habits of thought and behavior doesn’t replace them with new ones. I joked that I think she likes me because she acts avoidantly attached (we’re not going to date, but we’ll be friends awhile), but anyway, I’m sorry because I interrupted her a couple times and, while I didn’t quite yell, I did raise my voice a bit once or twice. I’d like to not do those things in the future.

            Comparatively, I’d acted well enough, but it’s a low bar. I explained that I’m still learning how to deal with awkward situations to try to make things better. I’m going to be more patient. She got a bit defensive, but in the end, all of this finally cut the tension that’d been lingering all night.

---

            We went by my apartment so I could set down my stuff. I was a little tired; my back and feet were killing me. I started the laundry. I came back out, and we walked down to the sea and used some guy’s hotspot so that she could get her ride back to where she was staying. He seemed annoyed, but I think he would’ve been too embarrassed to not help. “You’re welcome!” He grinned at us.

            I explained that, in the US, we would be reluctant to borrow someone’s hotspot. “Why?” Well, because we’re all selfish, and no one wants to help anyone. It’s considered rude and embarrassing to ask for help.

We stood there waiting, and my friend pointed out that, across the street, there was a little boy laying on the ground in front of the building. He had his t-shirt pulled above his head, and he lay in the fetal position. “Where are his parents?” Not good. She thought that the way he was laying was unnatural, so maybe he’s sick, but to me, it looked like a pretty normal way for a kid to sleep. I don’t know what to make of that disagreement, but anyway, I didn’t mention it.

            Eventually, the guy she’s staying with came and picked her up. She left, so I crossed the street to walk back toward my apartment.

As I crossed the street and got closer to the building, I saw the kid, and I kind of wanted to cry. I looked around. No parents, no police, no unoccupied adult. A guy with a corncart walked toward me, so I asked if he spoke English. I pointed to the kid. He smiled and shrugged. “Where are his parents? Could we call someone? What about the police?” He smiled and kept walking. A young guy came, and the same thing ensued. He stood there, smiling, not knowing what to do. He said something in Arabic. Then, an old security guard came. He wore a tan polo with blue letters—the name of some security company. He had brown skin and the white hair that forms a rotunda atop one’s head—caesarian. He also said something in Arabic. I asked about the parents again. He told me in English to go home. The younger guy said that the security guard said that the kid’s parents were walking along the coast. He again said to go home. I wasn’t sure, but what could I do? I walked home, unsure what I should’ve done.

Terror-Toilets: Of Child-Me

As a very small child, I was extremely afraid of toilets. I thought, If a toilet can make giant poops and loads of toilet paper disappear completely, then why couldn’t it do the same thing to my small, squishy body? I would watch the water swirl and spiral down into the big, sucking hole, and it frightened me. I knew nothing of the concept of death, but perhaps the toilet allowed me to intuit it. It was clear that whatever goes down the watery black hole would never return; whatever was flushed would cease to be.

I was sometimes overwhelmed by daymares by which I’d be dragged down the hole and become nothing-at-all. Perhaps, I never completely overcame this fear. I catch myself struck by a visceral desire to avoid being sucked into the porcelain whirlpool. In rare moments of automaticity, my body shudders and my eyes widen when I hear the static-shattering whoosh of that monster.

I wonder why children are so manichaean. It’s strange to think that I was once a child. In some ways, I still feel like a child—wondering, groping.

The Exhausting Effort to Breathe Life into a Fire

I spoke with Bernadette today, a little over an hour. She’d gotten a haircut. Her curly, messy hair hung just above her shoulders, and I thought she looked a little like Marion Cotillard, but maybe I was just romanticizing a bit. I didn’t tell her, anyway. I think people often don’t like being compared to others. She ended up telling me about how the nuns who’d taught her as a child, in Nice, were really sadistic—especially the headmistress. We cried.

We cried because of Minneapolis and because of covid. I didn’t sleep much last night. I’d watched a bunch of YouTube videos of white people proudly calling the police, unable to reckon with their mistaken, biased association, and too entitled and proud to keep from invoking the threat of murder in order to win an argument. She said that the reason she was so depressed wasn’t because she was hopeless, but because she was hopeful. She told me that hope is what you need to have in order to be disappointed, and I didn’t know what she meant at first.

I said that, finally, people wouldn’t have the excuse that the cop was afraid, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the guy was dangerous, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the film was unclear, they wouldn’t have the excuse that it was an in-the-moment decision, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the protesters started the looting, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the protesters were being violent. After the stimulus package and the calls to get people back to work, there’s no confusion about where the government’s, the bankers’, the police’s, and the media’s loyalties lie. Minneapolis and covid show that the reaction to Minneapolis and to covid have been meant to protect the stock market at the expense of the lives of the most vulnerable people. There’s no confusion. In relation to race, for instance, George Bush doesn’t care about black people, but Trump has real animosity toward them.

So, there’s no possible neutrality here anymore. There’s no equivocating. No more excuses. You’re either on the side of caring about black people’s lives or you’re on the side of white comfort. Then, Bernadette repeated what she’d said before: “You can’t be disappointed if you don’t have hope.”

I started to realize what she meant. I have all these friends who insulate themselves in the warm blanket of cynicism. If there’s nothing to do, then there’s nothing to really do about it. There’s nothing to risk. Any attempt would be foolish. They can complain from the sideline, but trying to help would only make matters worse. Why give up their own chance at some limited happiness in order to fight a losing battle? But, that’s why it’s so frustrating, right? If it’s hopeless, it’s because we make it hopeless. If it’s hopeless, it’s because peace-loving white liberals aren’t willing to march, aren’t willing to give up the brass bars at the entrance to their subdivision, aren’t willing to say, “I was wrong. I had a racist moment, and I judged you unfairly. I shouldn’t have accused you, and I’m sorry”—especially without expecting some undeserved gracefulness and forgiveness.

We talked about how sad we are. I told her that I wanted pizza delivered, so I could watch YouTube videos in my bed in peace. We agreed that we were depressed right now. We joked about it. I told her I have therapy on Monday. She encouraged me to go down to the beach. She told me about how, in Nice, she would go to the coast in the winter and the waves would crash wildly into the rocks on the shore. She told me how it made her felt connected to the world, and that the world was maybe reflecting her frustration back at her. Maybe, in that moment, nature felt what she felt, and she didn’t feel as alone. She would sometimes then go into MAMAC and stare at some particular impressionist painting that she’d sat in front of a hundred times, getting absorbed into the incomprehensible array of painted dots of various colors, making up a whole that all the people and parts of the environment made up.

Half-Reckoning in Blind Times

The droplets of water bubbled up on the side of the clear acrylic cup, appearing like glass warts. And as each pregnant drop eventually slipped precipitously down the wall of the chilly reservoir, the heat in the room oppressed as firmly as did the pressure from the conversation.

Joey was backed into a corner. She knew the answer to the question. She twitched in silence, as Mae peered only somewhat patiently.

“I don’t know,” Joey said.

“You do know.”

“She’s not abusive.”

“It’s abuse,” Mae said. She deflated. “Honey, it’s abuse. It’s abusive to insist someone don’t feel what they feel. It’s abusive to lie in order to blame someone instead of accepting responsibility. It’s abusive to tell someone everything’s gonna be okay when it won’t, especially when you have the choice to make it okay or not. It’s abusive to call someone, drunk, because you miss them when you won’t talk to them sober, especially when it’s just to tell them that you love them but also hate them. It’s abusive to let someone pay hundreds of dollars to stay with you only to turn them away for no good reason. It’s abusive to admit you got a problem and to say you’ll work to fix it and then refuse to do so. It’s abusive to refuse to admit when you’re wrong. It’s abusive to get in a relationship with someone and pretend you ain’t together.”

Joey felt her throat swell inside her throat. Joey wasn’t sure if Mae was right about all of them, but what was she going to do? Try to point out some technicality or two? Her head hung from the point where the vertebrae and the shoulderblades form a cross. She saw that her shoes were slightly muddy from the walk across Lydia Street.

“So what am I supposed to do?” she asked.

Quiet, Mae looked at her—Mae’s face like a tomb. “I don’t know, honey.”

“I’m not into this shit, Joe. It ain’t cool. Here’s the thing, honey: she ain’t gonna change for you. I know it don’t feel good. I ain’t blaming you. I ain’t mad at you. I’m worried about you. I’m scared for you. This all seems small. It don’t seem that big. I get that. I don’t blame you. I ain’t mad at you. I’m frustrated, but I get it. I’ve been there, and I know what love does. I want you both to be okay. I mean that. But right now, you’re in trouble, sugar, and I’m worried about you.”

Joey’s head had rotated up, followed by her eyes. She had big, dark brown eyes, and when they swelled with tears, Mae wanted to cry, too.

“I don’t know what to do,” Joey said.

“I don’t know either, baby. I’m not saying what you should do.”

They sat in silence, neither looking at the other.

“I’m mad at you, Joe.”

“I know.” Joey whimpered.

“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad, but not at you. Look, one of the hardest things to learn is that you can love someone and they can love you back, but that ain’t always enough. That’s real hard to get your head around. It’s not a head thing. I guess that’s why. It’s a heart thing. The heart don’t wanna accept it, even if the head really knows.

“You can love the shit outta someone. You can think you’re gonna go off and marry someone and have kids with someone and die in each other’s arms and all that shit, but that don’t mean you get to be with ’em. It don’t. It seems like it should. It’s a cruel thing the universe does. It’s unfair. It’s real unfair. I get that, but it is what it is, baby. Sometimes, you don’t get to be with the one you love, even when they love you back. Because what you gonna do? She already promised to go to therapy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You know, she’s hurting. Why would she put you through all this shit? Why would she call you and say she’s sorry? Why would she say she knows it’s her fault when she’s drunk? Why would she say you wanna fuck other people when you don’t fuck no one? She knows that. She’s admitted what she does. But here’s the thing, baby: she’s at the center of all this shit. Every time she does any of this shit, she’s hurting herself. She sits at home, and sometimes she don’t call you. She thinks this shit. She feels bad. Sometimes, she knows she’s wrong, but sometimes, she’s so upset that she can’t admit what she done. She blames you, and she know it ain’t your fault. Imagine how bad she gotta be hurting to come up with all this shit. She was suggesting you see other people and pretending you ain’t together when you’re apart just to deal with it. That shit’s crazy. Who does that? Why would someone do that? She ain’t happy.”

“I know,” Joey said.

“I know,” Mae said.

“Isn’t there a way? I mean, what if she did go to therapy? If she’s hurting, too, shouldn’t she get some help? For her sake!”

“Ain’t no ‘should,’ really. I mean, yeah, maybe, but that’s for her to decide. If she thinks she should—if she decides that she loves herself, that she wants to feel better, that she wants shit to work or even just to stop fuckin’ up her life—then maybe she’ll do it. But, you know, there’s no guarantee. She might go or she might not, but even if she does, she might be too embarrassed. She might figure all this shit out, but only after making a lot of mistakes with other people, and by then, she might not remember what happened. She might just remember some vague idea about how you were bad for her or something, not remember it was her who sabotaged shit. You don’t get to decide, honey. She can choose to be miserable if she wants to. It’s stupid and it sucks, but that’s what it is.”

Joey responded, “You know, she’s the one who suggested that we see other people. And I didn’t do shit with no one. I wasn’t perfect, but I tried. And, the difference between her and me is that I at least apologized and I’m working on my shit. I know I ain’t perfect, but I’m trying. How many times have I apologized to her? She made me believe all this shit is my fault. I only just realized it ain’t all my fault. She tricked me, somehow. How many days and nights did I sit in here, crying, wishing, begging, buying her gifts, apologizing for no reason? I mean, not no reason at all. I did things that pissed her off, too, and she coulda broken up with me for any of those, but she doesn’t even talk about them anymore. That’s not the shit that bothers her. The shit that bothers her is some shit she made up. I mean, she talks about how I talked to that Canadian girl when we were on a break, and she’s all mad about that, but she slept over at Steven’s house like a day or two after she said she wouldn’t do shit with anyone until after I got there and left at least. She says I cheated on her for texting someone, but she says she didn’t fuck this dude but just kissed him and slept at his place. He had a girlfriend at the time, too. I know you know this shit, but I’m just fuckin’ pissed. I’m sorry.”

Mae closed her eyes and shook her head.

Joey continued, “She talks about how she’s mad I went out with those people in Temple, but she told me it was okay. It’s all bullshit. She knows that. And, I forgave all this shit. She can’t forgive me, but there’s nothing to forgive. Should I not forgive her? But, I do forgive her!”

“Joey, I know. I’m so sorry, baby, but there ain’t shit you can really do. You’re better off moving past all this. At least for now. Maybe after a while, she’ll decide that she wants to do better for herself and the people around her, but all you can do is wait. I know that ain’t easy.”

“Move past it? Move past it how? What does that mean?”

Mae shifted her hips and slowly, intentionally drew air in through her nose. She exhaled, saying, “I don’t know, baby, but this ain’t doing you no good. She ain’t gonna be with you right now, and I think that’s for the best. You probably don’t wanna hear that. I get that, but what can you do? She’s bullshittin’, and it ain’t ’cause you’re wrong. I mean, maybe she thinks she’s mad at you, but how many times has she done some shit like this? You’re her first love—her first real relationship. She fucked other people only when she knew they were shippin’ out because she’s scared of commitment. That’s the truth. You’re the first person she ever let herself get close to. How many times is she gonna sabotage your relationship—and her own happiness!—before she decides she’s gonna stop runnin’? What’s she lookin’ for? Some perfection that she don’t even come close to? That ain’t it. And she’s already shown she can forgive your faults; what she can’t forgive is her own fear. She’s scared of lovin’ you, honey. She don’t wanna be hurt by you. That ain’t your fault, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. She has to decide that she wants to love herself and be good to herself and the people around her.”

Like the water down the glass, a trail ran down Joey’s cheek, ending in a glob of salty tear. “It ain’t fair,” she said. “It ain’t fair that you can love someone, they can love you back, but that person’s scared of that love, and you can’t be together.”

They sat in silence for a moment, long enough to be reminded of the roar of the locusts outside.

“I love her. I wanna be with her. She wants to be with me. She told me the other night she don’t wanna be with no one but she wants to be with me. I don’t even know what that really means, but she said it. She said she knows it’s not all my fault. She admitted that she ended things for no good reason, that she’s just scared. She was drunk, though, like I told you. It ain’t fair. I’m here everyday thinking how I love her so much and she loves me, and I can’t make her do what she has to do in order to be good to herself and to be happy with me. What am I supposed to do?”

“You’re right, Joey. It ain’t fair, and ain’t shit you can do. That’s just the way it is, sometimes. You can keep loving her, but you gotta move on for now. You can’t do shit about it, honey.”

“And then, she finally calls me sober after all these months, and she says it’s all my fault. And now, she won’t even talk to me.”

“Joey, honey, you don’t deserve this shit. Just be good enough to yourself to let it go. You gonna be okay.”

Joey didn’t feel it. She wasn’t so sure. She thought Mae was right, but from her perspective, it hardly seemed that anything could be okay. She worried about Alex, her now-former lover. She was mad at her, but she mostly wanted Alex to hold her and to commit to working through things. The not knowing was the hardest part.

In the Clear Midwinter

I’m sometimes struck by how strange the world is.
Then, I realize that it’s more-or-less been so all the time.
I then feel that it’s actually that I am strange and the world that
a moment ago seemed so mysterious
is really pretty boring.

Regret
He wanted to be forgotten. He wanted to have done something important. He wanted to do his penance in silence, but he also wanted to leave something to be remembered by, to be cherished. Mostly, he just didn’t want to continue to live a life of ill repute. He wanted to know what it felt like to be respected, even if that respect wouldn’t come until long after his death. He had once thought he was smart. He’d been told he was good-looking. He was tall, but not very. Now, he was old, fat, and forgetful. He longed for a gloriful youth that had never been his. He fantasized about moving to a small, poor island somewhere, taking advantage of his worldliness and white skin. But, he’d never been able to come up with a solid plan—much less to follow through. He wouldn’t have known where to begin. His options were limited, and by this point, his life had mostly been wasted. He thought of the women in his life—both those older and those younger than he—and what he’d meant to them. He was ashamed, and to him, that seemed appropriate.

He peered through the window. Why does the old Slavic woman always stare? What is she looking for? He turned his gaze to the wallpaper—off-white, yellow, and brown—at least forty years old now. Many of its edges bent toward air, toward freedom. Small cracks and tears imposed on the paper’s orderly pattern. In places, little fragments were lost, but it had held remarkably well in that old apartment. He stared at that wallpaper and tried to imagine how luxurious it had been for the family who had lived there before him. The kids had found success and moved on while the old couple had found the place simultaneously too big and too small for them in their old age. They were comfortable somewhere else now. He sat, drinking black tea with milk, staring at that wallpaper, no longer sufficiently confident to wish for something better. All that remained were a few years waiting for something to change or for everything to end. He no longer felt so self-righteous as to believe that he really deserved what he desired. All his remaining family now estranged to some degree or another, he was alone. He was too afraid to be depressed. He knew that he was a coward.

Desperation
My head swayed to the uneven rhythms of a piano concerto I didn’t really know. The long grey bus crossed the border. My new home. Freedom. I smelled the bluebonnets. I thought that they might be swaying to the same uneven rhythm.

What I really wanted to hear was the swooshed pounding of the drums in her chest—her chest the same color as the door to my father’s old office, the same color of coffee mixed with a bit too much milk. The tiny black hairs—like an open field over hilly flesh—invisible until your face is pressed so low against her skin that you smell the smell that only she makes. It’s sweet to me, but I only speak for me. Would she join me there where freedom was? Would her sentiments rule over her perfectly good reasons—her parents’ fears for their only daughter, the apprehensions of an unexpected affair, an unforeseeable life in an unimaginable place?

She knew a bit of Spanish, and she told me that she really did love me, but sometimes her face held thoughts that her fig-like mouth wouldn’t form. Couldn’t, perhaps. I knew she was scared. She sometimes wanted this to end, but now I had no choice. I put my faith in the joy and comfort that I knew she sometimes felt, but she was young and so unsure.

I didn’t want to go alone. What would I do? What is a life without family? And without her, I would have no one. She is my freedom in this place, and I hope that she is there.

Mourning
She sat parallel to the window, her head craned behind the glass. Her face a confused expression—wide lips turned up, splotches of carmine beneath yellow skin, thin salty streaks stretching themselves down, down. She peered out at the beautiful man—almost just a kid, really—about half her age.

She’d been overwhelmed with joy, barely able to construct a coherent thought to express to him. But he’d spoken gently, thoughtfully, generously, just as he always had. Besides his mahogany dimples and his firm physique, it was really this calmness and his big heart that had made her fall in love with him. But he couldn’t remember her. Not since she’d made the choice to protect him in the long run by hurting him just a little in the short run. She hadn’t wanted him to go back to war, and she knew he had a plan and a future. She saved him.

So, she stared at him as he peacefully walked away from her again. She smiled and she quietly cried, knowing that it had been selfish, risky, and necessary to have made the 3,000-mile trip to the sleepy wooded town. It was where he belonged, and where she did not, and she wished that it weren’t that way.

Leaving
“This is no longer a bus stop. The new bus stop is in front of the deli.” He motioned his open thumb behind him. “This is no longer a bus stop. The new bus stop is in front of the deli, okay?”

They’d removed the machines, and there wasn’t a way to pay on board, so the child rode the bus for free.

Today, I Believe in God, Part Four: Vessels Adrift

Pt. 1
Pt. 2
Pt. 3

Forgive me. This is a bit dumb, but I wanted to write it down so that I can try to remember it. Bear with me. Or don’t. I mean, I don’t wanna bother anyone. Not that anyone does or should read this. Anyway…

I’ve been having this terrible feeling. It’s like these spiny, smoky phantasms have been creeping around in the background, and they took some toxic something and poured it right into my soul. I don’t know what that means. I realize that I was wrong to judge Lily, though. Maybe sometimes we judge people to protect ourselves, but that doesn’t make us right. Not that it makes us wrong, but I also don’t think that it really makes sense to judge people. Doesn’t it say way more about us than about anyone else? That’s why I feel guilty again.

I find it easy to blame people. I do it all the time. When someone does something that’s different from how I’d do it, I think that they’re immoral or stupid or unfair or unthinking or something. Of course they have their reasons and of course they’re either thinking about what they’re doing or they’re just too stressed out to think. We all know that feeling when we’re all jittery and insomniac and our skin feels like it doesn’t fit us right and it feels like we’re not supposed to be in this world right now. Well, at least, that’s how I feel. I guess other people feel it, too, but maybe not everybody. But like I was saying, when I’m uncomfortable, I blame someone for it. If someone does something and I feel hurt, I assume it’s because they shouldn’t have done what they did. It’s easy to decide with a heavy index finger that someone should be held to my standard, but that doesn’t make sense, does it. It’s harder to come to the conclusion that, for weird reasons, I feel bad, and I’d probably be better off if I figured out what that was about and if I figured out how to deal with it.

To anyone not as stupid as I am, this’ll all be obvious. Sorry.

Sometimes men do this. Sometimes women do it. Sometimes non-binary people do it. White people, black people, Asians, etc. But, I don’t think that people are wrong when they point out that straight, white, cisgender men tend to act violent and entitled. It feels unfair. I hate it. I feel the disgust in someone’s shoulders or the way they avoid looking at me or how they say as few words as necessary if I say something or ask a question. It makes me feel alone. But that’s also unfair of me. I think everyone’s emotionally insecure and all that. I mean, I’m those things—all those things: male, white, straight, violent, entitled. I’m sorry. I don’t ever wanna hurt anyone. Maybe we all are those things, but for some reason, we seem to breed these men to act this way, and so I guess that’s part of why I act this way. Hopefully, I’m not too bad.

I’m back at school. It felt like I’d be in Europe forever (I managed to get outside Europe a little bit, but that’s not the point), but I’m back in reality now. It’s so weird and complicated. Sometimes, people don’t trust me and it makes me feel bad, but people probably look down at, and dismiss, people for being different from how I am more often than people look down at me, so I guess I shouldn’t blame people. I mean, I don’t know what anyone’s going through. If I lived everything that someone else did, why would I think that I’d make a different choice from them?

So, why did I treat Lily this way? Well, I guess it’s because, really, I’m in love with her. I mean, there are a lot of songs about love and movies about love and even books about love. So many. So many! But, I’ve felt some love before, and I don’t know if it felt like a book or a movie. Sometimes, pretty close, but how do you write a feeling? How do you show a feeling? I can’t reach into you and put a feeling there and you can’t, either. What I noticed about Lily is that I did the thing I always do. I did this violence. I strangled and suffocated and killed the lifeforce in our relationship. I’m not saying that she was perfect. You’ll remember my complaints about Lily, but weren’t they so petty? Why was I mad? I was mad because I love her. If I could point out what, to me, appear something like imperfections, then maybe it’s not all my fault. I think that secretly (to others, but more importantly, to myself), I tend to blame myself for everything. Not exactly. I just have this eyeless little bug that sits in the back of my brain and it just slowly gnaws and drools back there, and all it does is constantly convinces me that I might be judged and I might be blamed and I might be wrong. In the end, it’s like I’m not good enough for anything. But, I was good enough for Lily. That’s why she was with me, you know? She chose to be with me. She made her choice, and for her, it was right. I decided that I wasn’t good enough for her. Sometimes, she was confusing and sometimes she was unfair. But, you know, everyone is those things sometimes. It’s not her fault. It’s not my fault. Sometimes, it’s okay to let someone be a bit childish. She can be pretty childish, but that’s just my opinion. Maybe I’m doing it again. I mean, it’s not even any of my business. The thing is that I want to be with her and I always wanted to be with her, but I was stubborn and proud because I was scared. I felt alone and I felt guilty for just existing. I felt that she would definitely leave me. I made her decision for her without even realizing. I feel a bit stupid for it, but that doesn’t help.

No one’s perfect. Lily’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. But also, everyone and everything just are. Maybe that makes them perfect. I often think about this YouTube video I watched of some British guy from the seventies. I think he basically says that everyone’s already perfect always. That sounds weird, but when I think about it, it feels right. We sometimes do things that aren’t helpful or that are inconvenient or whatever. We’re all neurotic, sometimes. We all get distracted. I let my doubts distract me. I need to love myself. I was unfair to Lily and I kept her from having the relationship that she wanted to have with me.

I keep writing about God. For a second, I wanted to do something dumb, like I’d ask for God to intercede or I’d say that we’re all God together or something like that. Maybe that’s all true. I dunno. Do I believe in God? People ask me this more often than you might think. I think about it. I ask myself. If there’s a God maybe God shows herself most clearly in the spaces between two people, especially when they feel that indescribable vulnerability that we call “love.” I want God to be like that, and when God is like that, it’s really that God is giving us the gift of allowing us to give to each other. I want to give to Lily, but maybe I fucked it up and maybe it’s never coming back. There was something so warm between us. I really think that we do respect each other and admire each other. I really think that we both want what’s best for us. Maybe she’s mad at me, too. Maybe she’s frustrated and maybe she feels betrayed. She wouldn’t be wrong to feel that way, would she? Maybe she feels a bit insecure and a bit guilty. Our relationship didn’t work, and it’s always sad to sit along the shore and watch a vessel slowly char and wave around and topple over as the ashes and the fumes spread around, eventually dispersing until there’s nothing recognizable left. To me, that’s what it felt like between Lily and me. What happened to the transcendent, beautiful gift that we occupied together? Where is that thing? It’s never coming back, but I’d like to build a better boat if I could. I watch her from a distance, I cry, I wish, I pray. I feel guilt, I mourn. I hope and I hang my head.

I wrote this about blame, but it’s really about guilt. I want to change my name. Joey is dead. I want to have no name. Everyday I’m a different person, but I want to have this familiar soul beside me. No one could be for me what she is, and I don’t want anyone to be something else for me. I just want to learn to forgive myself and to show her that I can be patient and that I can give her the kind of love we all deserve. We’re all broken a little bit, and I just want to secrete for her the little bit of glue that can help to hold her together when she’s mad at me because she’s mad at herself because she’s mad at her dad from when she was eight or whatever. I mean, who knows how these things work? I just want to be good to myself and to be good to her. I want to work with her and to come up with strategies for how we can be good to each other.

But, I guess that can’t be. Not right now. I have to accept that and it’s so hard. I’m back at school and it’s hard to focus. I just want to talk to her about all of this. For hours and hours. I want to know why she’s mad at me. I want to tell her why I’m mad at myself. I want to hear what I did wrong. I want us to talk about what we can do to behave differently. I’m just going around in circles now. I just wish that things were different.

Anhalter Bahnhof

 

This is a story that I (with some help) translated into German. First is the German version; after that, you will find the English version. I hope that you enjoy it. Any suggestion(s) for a better translation would be greatly appreciated.

German version:

Ihr Gesicht war wie ein verlassenes Zimmer, ihr Fleisch wie eine vergilbte Tapete, sie saß da und starrte durch das abgedunkelte Fenster, als hörte sie die fallenden Blätter. Auf dem sterbenden Gesicht schräg abfallende Linien, als würden sie von der Schwerkraft nach unten gezogen und sich in tieferen Furchen bündeln, wie auf einer Landkarte.

Wie viele heiße und kalte Kriege hatte sie durchgemacht? Und das Ende von all dem war der Höhepunkt ihrer verzweifelten Resignation.

Als der Eiserne Vorhang fiel, konnten das Feuerwerk und das Neonlicht die Trompeten und die Siegesmärsche nicht übertönen. Männer in schwarzen Anzügen schrien utopische Reden, aber ihr Leben blieb still. Ihre Füße waren kalt und ihre Hände waren schwielig. 1990 kaufte sie eine französische Spitzendecke für den Küchentisch. Sie kostete sieben D-Mark beim Discounter und ersetzte die ausgedünnte sowjetische Tischdecke.

Später in diesem Jahr wurde ihr Ehemann krank, aber er war schnell wieder gesund. Er war sowieso kurz vor dem Ruhestand. Die Kinder zogen aus—zuerst eins, dann das andere—und der Küchentisch war halb voll, aber die Luft war weit weniger laut. Sie hatte den Mann nie wirklich kennen gelernt, neben dem sie saß, den sie ernährt, geliebt, oder mit dem sie geschlafen hatte. Sie war zu beschäftigt gewesen—immer in Bewegung, immer sich um die anderen kümmern, immer hinterherputzen—um zu erfahren, für wen sie selbst sich hielt. Jetzt, wo der Küchentisch drei Plätze zu viel hatte, wagte sie nicht danach zu fragen. Sie sah fern, um so zu tun, als ob sie beschäftigt ist. Sie aß sogar manchmal auf der alten Chartreuse-Couch, weil niemand es jemals erfahren würde und sie nicht länger stolz genug war, sich darum zu scheren. Sie überging/ignorierte die Frage in statischem Zustand. Sie konnte sich selbst nicht eingestehen, dass die Antwort, die sie fürchtete, “niemand” war.

Sie hörte die Glocke, und die Stimme des Mannes über den Lautsprecher sagte: “Anhalter Bahnhof.” Sie umklammerte ihre Tasche und freute sich auf die Blaubeeren, die um diese Jahreszeit wachsen, und ihre Schuhe klackerten auf dem Bahnsteig.

English version:

Her face like an abandoned room, her flesh like old yellow wallpaper, she sat peering through the blackened window like someone listening to the falling leaves. The oblique lines on her dying face abruptly turned to meet gravity, bunching into deeper divides, like a topographical map. How many hot and cold wars had she been through? And, the end of all that was the climax of her desperate resignation.

When the Iron Curtain fell, the fireworks and neon couldn’t drown out the trumpets and the victory marches. Men in black suits screamed utopic speeches, but her life remained still. Her feet were cold and her hands were calloused. In 1990, she bought a French lace cover for the kitchen table. Costing seven Deutschmarks at the discount megamarket, it replaced the thinned Soviet tablecloth.

Later that year, her husband got sick but he soon recovered. He was near retirement, anyway. The kids vacated–first one, then the other–and the kitchen table was half-full but the air was far less noisy than that. She had never really know the man she sat next to, fed, made love to, or parented with. She had been too busy–always moving, always caring for, always cleaning after–to learn who she thought she was. So, now that the kitchen table had three too many places, she didn’t dare to ask. She watched TV to tell herself that she was doing something. She even let herself eat on the old chartreuse couch, sometimes, because no one would ever know and she was no longer proud enough to care. She drowned the question in static. She couldn’t tell herself that the answer she feared was “no one.”

She heard the bell and the man’s voice over the loudspeaker said, “Anhalter Bahnhof.” She clutched her bag, looking forward to the blueberries that grow this time of year, and her feet clicked on the platform.

Today, I Believe in God, Part Three: Die Anhalter Bahnhof Mannschaft

Pt. 1
Pt. 2

I step into the traincar at Anhalter Bahnhof. It’s the prettiest metro station in Berlin. A woman is yelling and laughing. At first, I figure it might just be the dramatic peak of a story between friends. People can be loud with they’re friends when they’re relating stories, but this lady keeps going.

She’s pretty. She’s young, in good shape. She’s blonde, but not in the cheap, shitty way like you see on TV or in magazines. Dirty blonde, maybe. She looks like a real person, and she seems like she could be kind, but I guess it’s easier to look real when you’re a bit disheveled and greasy. She’s mockingly half-crying now.

She keeps screaming and wailing about Deutschland, something, something, but I’m not figuring it out exactly. But then, she throws a bit of “Korea!” into her rant and the thing becomes clearer. Asians sit on the bus. They mostly laugh at her, but she gesticulates toward them—“Korea! Korea!”—and she asks them questions.

I want to yell at this woman but I don’t exactly make out what it is that she’s saying.

south Korea — 2
Germany — 0

The other day, this US (not “American”—Americans are all the people living in the American continent[s]) ex-pat guy was telling me how Germany has gone so far out of their way to deal with their Nazi past. He talked about how Germans can’t get “HH” or “88” on their license plates, about all these memorials, about a bit of German guilt, and so on, but then, he also told me about how they have a new political party called the AfD, and that they’re basically just racist against Middle Easterners. Bill Maher and other proto-fascists like to point out that being anti-Islamic isn’t racist because it’s not the race that they have the problem with. In the 1930s, I read that Hitler and other anti-Semites used to blame the Jews for capitalism, for communism, for cosmopolitanism, for inflation, and for anything else. I guess those people didn’t have a problem with Jews’ race, either. Anyway, when Bill Maher says that they should pull out all the “Mohammeds” from the line at the airport and search them, I don’t suppose that Bill thinks that they should pull out all the white Muslims from Eastern Europe or the Asian ones from Kazakhstan or Indonesia. Is it the religion that he really has the problem with?

Anyway, for all the German guilt over the Holocaust, it’s weird that so many of them are racist against Middle Easterners. It’s also weird that German culture is still associated with order, blind rule-following, fetishization of technology, religious bigotry, and extreme nationalism. What would happen in this country today if they suddenly faced extreme inflation or some other terrible economic disaster? Who’s to say?, I guess.

Somehow, this blonde lady seems so opposite to the lady from the train in Serbia. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know either of them. I don’t even know what the blonde lady was saying. It made me so mad, but maybe I got madder than I needed to. I guess one never needs to get mad. Racism makes me angry. It’s fashionable to get angry at racism. That’s a weird thing. If you don’t get angry when people are racist, then people get mad at you for not getting angry. But, most people are racist. Most of the people who get most angry at the not-outwardly-angry-at-the-ractists are quite racist.

Like, I met this lady who’s in school right now in DC, and she knew all the things to say. She knew all the lingo, she knew all the contemporary issues, but she’s never even had a friend who wasn’t white! She’s going to grad school in the fall, and she’s in these anti-racist clubs, but she wears expensive clothes, goes on expensive vacations all over the world, and her parents pay for her school. She doesn’t care about poor people or consumerism or sacrifice or anything like that. I think that she’s basically a capitalist. One time, I was talking about how I think we need to get away from consumerist culture, that we need to have real democracy, and we have to remake our institutions and do things very differently. She said that she gets annoyed when people talk like that because they just don’t sound realistic. I don’t know how we’re supposed to have equal rights between genders or races or anything else under the current paradigm, and I don’t know what’s realistic about continuing to expand production and consumption until there’s no earth left, but whatever.

I wonder if that lady from Serbia will email me. I guess probably not. It turns out that Berlin is not a place for me. I’ve come to realize that the German obsession with rules has something to do with individualism. If everyone’s simply responsible for abiding society’s rules, then no one owes any responsibility to anyone else. No one has to care for anyone else, no one has to think of themselves as part of a community or anything like that.

I told someone that I thought that a lot of Berliners dress really dorky. She started yelling at me, saying that I was ridiculous and that I wasn’t fashionable. Berliners can be pretty edgy. I meet a lot of sarcastic, science-obsessed, polyamorous atheists who wear all black and have facial piercings and dyed hair. I wonder how many of them vigorously support die deutsche Fußballnationalmannschaft. I wonder how many of them wanted to yell at Koreans after the match. Maybe I’m being too hard on them. There’s certainly something ironic about me being violent toward them in my thoughts like this. I should work on that, I guess.

Pt. 4

Algeciras

13 Arab men and I stood around in an almost-circle. At the opening of the crescent stood a Spanish woman with hair dyed orange, wearing a navy suit, white dress shirt, and a blue lanyard around her neck. The ends of her mouth curled upward, and she absent-mindedly fidgeted. Every couple minutes, she would stop take a phone call, and she’d have news. The other men spoke Arabic among themselves during these breaks before we’d again begin asking very direct questions. Eventually, she said, “Lo siento” and “Solo diez minutos,” before she ploughed off.

The men stood there, continuing to bitch and moan. During our interrogation, the sun had rediscovered its place in the sky. The modernist buildings facing us glowed different shades of golden brown—the color of a pie crust that you’re supposed to pull from the oven.

The seagulls flew in elliptical patterns, scattered and disorderly. They might’ve seemed angry, but I figured they were just seagulls after all. Dark clouds blocked the tops of the mountains that seemed only a few meters away. I guess it’ll rain. The mountain revealed brown-gray layers of sediment between trees and grass—a cake of mud and pine needles. I stared at the mountains for a few minutes.

Eventually, the men behind me again caught my attention after one of them began to speak more loudly. My head rotated over my shoulder, and the cranes and machines in the background hovered as though shocked into paralysis—mechanical monsters waiting for work that would likely never come. It feels a little creepy to associate shipping containers with the salty sea—not just because of the deaths of all the jobs but also because the sea seems so pure and the shipping yards seem so dirty and cheap.

A finch landed in front of me and began picking at some flesh from an orange that looked like it’d exploded on the grey brick walkway. I then thought I , too, was hungry. She said “diez minutos” diez minutos ago. But, the bus was so late that I was already gonna have to catch a different barco, so it didn’t make much difference.