I remember being eight and sitting in the kitchen holding a ballpoint pen. I remember my mother when she wore yellow, beautiful like a finch and then the finch died.1 I remember seeing the sun filter through the windows my mom scrubs and seeing her wrinkled under-eyes sag in the sun, and I remember drawing her eyes without the skin on my notepad, half in an attempt to erase them and half because I didn’t yet learned to crosshatch shadow. I remember crawling downstairs to the parking lot where my dad fixed his Kawasaki and drawing the green gears he kept changing, and I remember from my eyes onto pen and paper the gears fell into lumps of inky steel, and I remember rubbing them out, furiously, hot tears stinging my mosquito-scabbed cheeks because I couldn’t hold my pen properly. I remember thinking my father was mean but knowing he was kind. I remember thinking my father was kind but knowing he was mean.1
I remember every dinner at the gas station with dad's teeth buffed with cigar-ash and the Saturday night the antique cars paraded by for hours and I couldn’t breathe for the fumes and I was happy. I remembered watching my father hand my mother her roti, wondering how, being so different, they could have formed a union—me; me, a mixture of the violence of one and the gentleness of the other. I remember lying in bed, sandwiched in the middle of my parents as a barricade, snug as a bug next to sleeping grenades. I remember feeling alone. I remember wondering how I should lie to my cousin when she asked me about my weekend, when she’d tell me she chased her older brother in the yard and how high her father would push her on the swings, and I remember my soft pink envy flooding, knowing my father could push me just as high, how I’d make revolutions on the swing-set only if he was happy only if his motorcycle was fixed only if my mother scrubbed the windows only if all the broken bowls in the house were reglued only if my mother never married only if she hadn’t put family first only if Cambodia was never bombed only if I was never born to teach my father to love properly (I failed) and only if he felt like pushing me on the swings.
I remember thumbing my tear-away notepad with the ballpoint-ink gears that fell into no-shapes and falling asleep and, years later, reading James Baldwin on my own bed, where “another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.”
1 Ruefle, Mary. Trances of the Blast. Wood Tangle. Wave Books, 28 July 2020.
