My mommy told me I could be anything I wanted to be

Today, a new Japanese girl from came to my school, carrying a tattered book bag and an English grammar book. She spoke with a heavy accent until kids I used to swap stories with made chinging noses in their mouth like pennies clanging together while pulling their eyes sideways thinly. Then, she didn't speak at all, but pressed her mouth tightly waiting for those gruesome faces, masquerading as mirrors, to disappear. They are kids, I thought, kids that pointed out her dark skin and dark hair but mostly her face that they tried to imitate by pressing their palms against their cheek bones, trying to make them as flat as their words. Kids that did not realize that yelling "go back to your own country!" wasn't worth their laughter and their smiles.

I wanted to say 'hey, it's ok,' but all I could do was share my lunch with her, because the cafeteria food was atrocious. There's more to America then this, I wanted to say. Don't be like them and be too quick to judge.

_____

All in all, it's been one hell of a bad day. I didn't realize there were kids that still acted like that - like they're six and cruel, and I wish I could have made them see that making fun of her, making fun of anyone in general, wasn't worth the five minute cheap thrill they got from blasting words that they thought were clever.

This was an actual comment I heard: "I swear, Asian girls duck tape their chest to make them flat as possible. Why do they have to look so funny and ugly anyway?"

Yeah, um... 

You don't feel hot, but your fingers steam up your binder anyway. Last month, you wasted an hour (and a grade) teaching some kid math that you knew he'd fail anyway. You think if you can give and give, one day, you'll wake up and realize your empty as beer bottles propped up against the door of a broken athlete with a tight cast and bandage wrapped around his joint. There will be nothing left to give, and you ache, somewhere in your rib cage where you feel something large fill up the echoes, for that satisfaction.

Nobody knows this, but you are cruel to the people you like. You spend all day convincing everyone else that you don't like these people that, in the end, you are surrounded by people you hate and people whose hands you think you can snap so easily. The thing is, you do not care enough to try, and you are only holing yourself up in a corner.  It is incredibly stupid. It is as stupid as the toys your older brother had put up on the top of his bookshelf. They used to stare at you behind the plastic wall. One day, you went up there and pulled it down. You took it out of its package and put it against your Monster Truck, who won, hands down. Your brother wouldn't look at you after that, because, at that time, you thought a bottle of glue could fix everything that you had taken apart.

Finding a new vocabulary in a book.

*

I sometimes wonder what it feels like to be hidden, not hiding, inside a tattered coat pocket, where I am small enough to spread my dress across my legs like leaves. One day, the owner will take me out and say, 'you'll grow up one day,' and I'll reply, 'you'll never get to see it,' even though I know it is useless; my words will get muffled by the distance and land somewhere between my feet. So instead, I'll latch on to a sheet of wind and watch, spitefully, myself getting away.

It will happen when the night is so dark, you can only see the teeth of the Cheshire cat (he'll have big lips) grinning down at you with its large nails glinting at odd places.

But this is just a thought and will never truly happen. Unless, of course, it's happening right now.

*

A scrapbook of someone else's life, and a letter s/her refused to open. I'll keep it sa/fe for you.

They say you're crazy, but I'll smooth it out for you and say stubborn because, really, there is no difference (if you could only read what society hangs on your bedroom walls -- that's not me, that's them - wait/ yes). I am secretly jealous of you, blocks of green that pile up with every silent selfishness (all yours). There is a movie that stole your tongue away but no vernacular is good enough for you, and my dictionary can only go so far. You can not put into the screen what you can not take out, and your paint never seems to dry in time.

I wonder if you're lonely, but loneliness is for the arrogant, and you are too breathless for hollow bones and vain aching in your rib cage. Tell me why you're different; it's part mine, you know.

There is a game I play in school.

*

I like to stop by a random locker every Monday and drop a piece of paper stuffed with words that are stuck between everything that should be kissing silence but slipped away in dim light and everything that could never out-stay a welcome, so did not know when to leave. It is four sheets a month I leave with an unknown face, until I find another scrap of metal that could be separating me from a hand that has outgrown mine and leaves me forlorn and decrepit in a derelict house. I wonder who they are, what stories they grew up from (if any), when they lost the brazen bravery that marks the period of all childhoods and, most of all, I wonder if they know what I was trying to reach (are we there yet?).

I can't help but think that you are doing a lot of staring at the sun. Or to be more specific, a lack of staring, because this isn't like walking or watching a left hand man learn to use his right, but squinting so hard you nearly turn blind in a fit of desperation and need. When you look away, you can see dark spots clinging spitefully to your vision to take the place of something real.

*

All dreams somehow end up washed down and broken apart until they become echoes in a seashell or stuck in someone else's toes, and you realize you have been holding on for far too long to a plan that has become hackneyed and muddled. I am dying, you think, and I reply, so am I. We have all been dying since the first wail was ripped out of our throats by an obscure face dressed in white, and it is only a matter of time before death catches up to us, wheezing or skipping or none of the above, but without a doubt wearing a smothering cloak to tie down our hearts.

The optimists call this living, and I greet them with a smile and a tip of my hat.

*

To: Doctor Oc.
From: A loyal fan. There is no caitiff footstep tracing to be done; none of us defy gravity.

I can not be made into another knight in shining armor. Friends have tried, but I do not work that way.

My cat is in love with the fast shadows and flashing faces on the TV; the way the picture slides with a click of my mouse on the computer. I see him pressing his face against the screen as if waiting for it to come alive like a dead mother. It is almost tragic in a way.

Today, I let him see that there was a world outside of the tall white walls and carved wooden tables and chairs that decorate his life. It was dark outside, and I was half afraid that he might slip inside a bush where he would make friends with the hidden whispers underneath the earth and forget about the blurring real faces that are flat to the touch. I am not afraid that he doesn't love me; I am afraid that he doesn't understand.

I am a detective at heart, and things burn brightest as a mystery. There is nothing like an impression and the way it tingles to the back of my head and down to the edge of my toenail, the one that likes to go waving outside my panty hose. Afterwards, there are too many notes and sharp arrows that will eventually point to the beginning of another tragedy.

*

Yesterday was the closest night I will ever come with a boy. He was looking at me through his sunglasses like he was something Apollo, and I could not stop staring at the odd way I was reflected back on his lenses while he stuck his tongue in my mouth and wiggled it around until I couldn't stand it anymore and pushed him back.

I told him that the point of kissing was not to drown me, and I was almost glad that he had those awful glasses on to hide the crumpled train wreck behind his eyes, circled, highlighted, and watered out.

I am frustrated, because I can not stop imagining all the boys I know fitting into Apollo jr.'s eyes and nose and lips and the curve of his cheeks, but mostly his eyes, and until I can find the few that survived, I will never be able to remember any of their faces and the way they spoke about fingertips catching on a sigh and the way they felt, burning off one eyelash at a time for each summer day wasted.

My new condition is not too horrible. There is a not-too-distant firecracker going off, and finally, there are less people to miss. I lay around lazily on the lawn and watch the sprinklers go off near me every time I feel my skin begin to curl.

It is an eastern tragedy: 61 seconds till my destination, and all I have on my hands are ostracized pieces of dirt wedged in under my fingernails. You have left me for a better scenery where the clocks don't go ticking, but I rather like that sound and the way it slither and creeps on my ears and up to the corners of my eyes where it imprints itself into edges. It is the only thing I have to waste now, and sometimes, while I'm laughing, I realize that the lump in my throat isn't from all the bottled kisses I shove in my mouth to force down the new reality handed to me in a single sentence, but something rather more thick and accented and what had been the crux of the matter in the first place - you are where even time zones can not reach you.

I vaguely resent you for this, and I pray for this to be fixed (until my prayers have become written in glass like a greeting) to the God who is too proud to play Santa, even when I have been man-made into happiness. Here, there is no sympathy, only pollution, choking up my eyes, and I feel it should not be this way.

It has been 60 seconds and, like always, I am no ready than before. This is all I know: I miss you, your music, your footprints next to mine, and the way you carried your watch while we waited for our parents to call us back home.