After my hour commute from the literary agency, I waved ‘hello’ to the halal cart man who had become an unexpected friend. He gave me some free snack fries. He treated me like a kid. Then I jotted something down that I stared at all night:

I want to always be known as a child. My faults expected. Free to change my mind and make myself the fool.

I looked back at my past posts, terrible. I read the word, “woman,” more often than I was comfortable with. The times I argued I was an adult, I was a child. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had the fervor nor the interest to make my point. God, I’m losing my interest.

ph. by me

I’m not saying that New York has wrestled it from me. That the city’s trains hold the mourning and unfamiliarity has changed to dislike. But I have lost something. To make up for it, I throw post-its up on my ceiling, fridge, drawers. I remind myself, you’re still a person and even if you have nothing, you have your goals. The shocks of bright paper tell me I know who I am. Yet, on special days when I come up empty and my desires turn to smoke, the bit of child that does remain wonders what she’ll get for giving up– as if all must be fair.

Résumé by Dorothy Parker

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp,

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

ph. by me

In bed with three awfully hard cushions propped behind me, I read this poem out loud (from Pinsky and Dietz’ Poems to Read). “Might as well” fit like a backscratcher between “You” and “live” and it got me laughing until I toppled from my spot. I had gone through 193 pages before finding this Dorothy Parker gem. Salty. Sharp. A kind of piece I’d never taken to before.

It reminded me of 2009 when my losing streak was at its prime. I was entrenched in fears. How to learn without talent? How to listen without anger? Living seemed only an option since there was no immediate nuisance (that death would bring). So I lived, or more accurately, just sat and watched things move around me for a little bit. It wasn’t exciting.

I think I’m trying to say that I’ve been lost and breathless, a ghost in clothes. And I will probably go through that again, but I feel now, that I can survive it. It wasn’t so bad. If I’m living, I might as well write, and if I’m writing I might as well grow and be changed to what I can’t imagine. After all, I don’t want to die in an iron mask. The only poetry I leave, being the thoughts I never got to say.

No matter how much we age, he’d lived more than me in the most similar circumstances (environmentally, biologically). To me, his word was final not because he was exceptionally loud, but because his word conveyed the world I’d face. He walked, broke his bones before I did. So there was always something to learn and be afraid of. Though he was particularly cruel with his bullying antics in my childhood, I think I was scared for other reasons. I believed he had a right to despise me. My parents reminded, “he’s had it worse” and even he must feel—he was a child faulted for being one and had thus grown to be an adult prematurely.

The whole way, I’d felt sorry for myself watching him (things I’d have to endure but never came). Like a worn broom he cleared my footpath. By the time it was my turn, I had little to bear. Evidently, I had had a childhood at all. When my parents blanked, lost me in a wonder park, it was my brother to find me huddled by the cobblestone street. I realized it’s not him that scares me. It’s what I imagine: a boy having to find his own way back to his lost parents. And most selfishly, what I would’ve done without that boy having suffered so.

Because love could be so difficult to refine, I used fear instead. It was the only way I could communicate a sincerity for God. When everything was terrifying beyond their temporal rationale, there was no family or drink I begged for more than Him. And the darker the corner, the vents, the greater my gravity towards Him. Beyond wanting to feel love, I wanted to stay alive though I couldn’t merit it from the unnatural fear I fed Him. I’d stare at my plaster walls, looking for a flicker, making bets in my head. If You’re here, show me a streak of shine. If You think I’ll get through the day, make a clang from the sill. Show me I still have life beyond this.

I wanted the lush sight to sink into my bones, the feeling that I could bound over the mountain edge into the black space. I must have been in a snow globe when the top cracked open, a whole set of capabilities and vigor widening my mind. Like I hit “empty bin” to the trash I didn’t know that held me back physically, mentally, psychologically, socially from fitting dreams/goals into a worth life. Sometimes, there are grave mounds on the mountainside, the old generations that sleep with one eye open. I smiled out of ego. The past and their spirits, the precursor staring wearily at the future generation that drives by on bald tires. The feared world they must have left. I wanted to make them proud.

One glass specialist explains that water seeped between the panes of the double-paned glass and the “minerals reacted and caused some type of acidic reaction that appears to have etched the glass.” -Boston Globe

In immediate reaction I feel fear even as I know as Virgil that Fear is simply an emotion and reaction to the material world. Fear is useless should one believe there is no chance, no accident, to the happenings in our world only God knows and with trust in Him things will unravel through his Divine Will. And so Fear is useless and having given so much thought to such trivial matters lowers our own stature in this world. Humans are too great and advanced a being to regret, hate, and fear we must yearn to be immutable and these extremes do not provide aid. Humans have the power to fall and so justly have the power to rise over fear with his gift of REASON of his rational mind! Lady Philosophy has shown Boethius the beauty in identifying the mutable as mutable, as changing and therefore unimportant. This keyboard will eventually fall apart I cannot whine that I have no more a source to divulge these thoughts. My single understanding that the keys would eventually break allows a beautiful appreciation and sense of wholeness with or without them.

My life so dull I often contemplate what I could have been in the time of raids and guerilla warfare! To train with animals and run like the cheetah as the soft pads beneath my feet harden, my stance wide and ready, my body lean and tan to become the Woman Warrior I know I am. Or why not be at the court of Queen Katherine to be a waiting lady or the French Court where Anne Boleyn had grown into intellectual and dangerous graces. Would I have been one to be a Wideacre heiress and breathe, know my own land as my own body. To drink from my stream and lay in my lush fields of green. I would make wine not like Syrah of Sonoma that is much too sweet with my meat. It is Cabernet Sauvignon by EK because I cannot do AK then that would be Anne Klein and I do not particularly like Angela Koh it is too long and Eun Koh is too short for beautiful cursive so large EK is enough for me. Only Sweet Discipline whispers if I am not happy now I shall not be happy with these other lifestyles I will never be satisfied if not now. And I hate to rebel with full knowledge for it is different should I have no knowledge and to go off with wants and needs, but to know is to have full responsibility and should I submit to this material world I become unlike my true self, the image of God. Chiampi, you affect me in my ways of speech and thought I wonder what great trials have brought you here to Irvine.