Munchausen

I’m watching the colour drain from the sky and wondering why it’s so beautiful to watch something cease to be, like dying is prettier than living. I don’t know if other people think about death and their inability to love functional people when looking at sunsets, but I kind of hope they do. I hope they see the pink and the orange bleeding into the horizon and think about their lovers and their flaws. I hope they get quiet for a second, and remember things they haven’t remembered in years. I don’t know what else a sunset could possibly be for.

I don’t want to write about you, but it’s all my hands remember (or care to say).

The summer air is now laced with autumn breezes. Time is passing.

Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.

I wonder if you know yet that you’ll leave me. That you are a child playing with matches and I have a paper body. You will meet a girl with a softer voice and stronger arms and she will not have violent secrets or an affection for red wine or eyes that never stay dry. You will fall into her bed and I’ll go back to spending Friday nights with boys who never learn my last name. I have chased off every fool who has tried to sleep beside me. You think it’s romantic to fuck the girl who writes poems about you. You think I’ll understand your sadness because I live inside my own. But I will show up at your door at 2 am, wild-eyed and sleepless. and try and find some semblance of peace in your breastbone. and you will not let me in. You will tell me to go home.

god once spoke to me and said, “I will break every bone in your body and bleed you until you beg for the blood of others” and I decided then I’d rather die fractured than live patched with pieces of you.

I’d kill to see your dignity sold at the thrift store where you bought that two dollar smile. give it up for me and I’ll lie down for you anything to see you cringe. I’m a lot sicker than the cancer your lungs have been breathing but not half as bad as that arsenic you’ve been slipping me for years.

I don’t want to say I love you. if I say I love you, it’s conventional. if I say love, it’s the same word I use for flowers and you are much more radiant. I tell my roommate, my dog my coworkers but I don’t want to tell you. you are not my favorite dessert or my old teddy bear. you are more than I love you. I will tell you that you smell like sunshine and your smile makes me soft I will tell you to call when you get home and wear your seatbelt I will brush your hair from your eyes I will kiss the birthmark you hate and I will give you my body and soul and that is not love

you smile like you hate the world so much that it’s comical. you wrap yourself up in metaphysics like a blanket so tight that it chokes you and love louder than anyone so loud it hurts your voice so loud there’s none left for you. and I bet you’re lonely shut away in your head I bet no one climbs in to see if your bleeding has stopped. I hope you’re okay.

What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.

i. “Your name is Tasbeeh. Don’t let them call you by anything else.” My mother speaks to me in Arabic; the command sounds more forceful in her mother tongue, a Libyan dialect that is all sharp edges and hard, guttural sounds. I am seven years old and it has never occurred to me to disobey my mother. Until twelve years old, I would believe God gave her the supernatural ability to tell when I’m lying. “Don’t let them give you an English nickname,” my mother insists once again, “I didn’t raise amreekan.” My mother spits out this last word with venom. Amreekan. Americans. It sounds like a curse coming out of her mouth. Eight years in this country and she’s still not convinced she lives here. She wears her headscarf tightly around her neck, wades across the school lawn in long, floor-skimming skirts. Eight years in this country and her tongue refuses to bend and soften for the English language. It embarrasses me, her heavy Arab tongue, wrapping itself so forcefully around the clumsy syllables of English, strangling them out of their meaning. But she is fierce and fearless. I have never heard her apologize to anyone. She will hold up long grocery lines checking and double-checking the receipt in case they’re trying to cheat us. My humiliation is heavy enough for the both of us. My English is not. Sometimes I step away, so people don’t know we’re together but my dark hair and skin betray me as a member of her tribe. On my first day of school, my mother presses a kiss to my cheek. “Your name is Tasbeeh,” she says again, like I’ve forgotten. “Tasbeeh.” ii. Roll call is the worst part of my day. After a long list of Brittanys, Jonathans, Ashleys, and Yen-but-call-me-Jens, the teacher rests on my name in silence. She squints. She has never seen this combination of letters strung together in this order before. They are incomprehensible. What is this h doing at the end? Maybe it is a typo. “Tas…?” “Tasbeeh,” I mutter, with my hand half up in the air. “Tasbeeh.” A pause. “Do you go by anything else?” “No,” I say. “Just Tasbeeh. Tas-beeh.” “Tazbee. All right. Alex?” She moves on before I can correct her. She said it wrong. She said it so wrong. I have never heard my name said so ugly before, like it’s a burden. Her entire face contorts as she says it, like she is expelling a distasteful thing from her mouth. She avoids saying it for the rest of the day, but she has already baptized me with this new name. It is the name everyone knows me by, now, for the next six years I am in elementary school. “Tazbee,” a name with no grace, no meaning, no history; it belongs in no language. “Tazbee,” says one of the students on the playground, later. “Like Tazmanian Devil?” Everyone laughs. I laugh too. It is funny, if you think about it. iii. I do not correct anyone for years. One day, in third grade, a plane flies above our school. “Your dad up there, Bin Laden?” The voice comes from behind. It is dripping in derision. “My name is Tazbee,” I say. I said it in this heavy English accent, so he may know who I am. I am American. But when I turn around they are gone. iv. I go to middle school far, far away. It is a 30-minute drive from our house. It’s a beautiful set of buildings located a few blocks off the beach. I have never in my life seen so many blond people, so many colored irises. This is a school full of Ashtons and Penelopes, Patricks and Sophias. Beautiful names that belong to beautiful faces. The kind of names that promise a lifetime of social triumph. I am one of two headscarved girls at this new school. We are assigned the same gym class. We are the only ones in sweatpants and long-sleeved undershirts. We are both dreading roll call. When the gym teacher pauses at my name, I am already red with humiliation. “How do I say your name?” she asks. “Tazbee,” I say. “Can I just call you Tess?” I want to say yes. Call me Tess. But my mother will know, somehow. She will see it written in my eyes. God will whisper it in her ear. Her disappointment will overwhelm me. “No,” I say, “Please call me Tazbee.” I don’t hear her say it for the rest of the year. v. My history teacher calls me Tashbah for the entire year. It does not matter how often I correct her, she reverts to that misshapen sneeze of a word. It is the ugliest conglomeration of sounds I have ever heard. When my mother comes to parents’ night, she corrects her angrily, “Tasbeeh. Her name is Tasbeeh.” My history teacher grimaces. I want the world to swallow me up. vi. My college professors don’t even bother. I will only know them for a few months of the year. They smother my name in their mouths. It is a hindrance for their tongues. They hand me papers silently. One of them mumbles it unintelligibly whenever he calls on my hand. Another just calls me “T.” My name is a burden. My name is a burden. My name is a burden. I am a burden. vii. On the radio I hear a story about a tribe in some remote, rural place that has no name for the color blue. They do not know what the color blue is. It has no name so it does not exist. It does not exist because it has no name. viii. At the start of a new semester, I walk into a math class. My teacher is blond and blue-eyed. I don’t remember his name. When he comes to mine on the roll call, he takes the requisite pause. I hold my breath. “How do I pronounce your name?” he asks. I say, “Just call me Tess.” “Is that how it’s pronounced?” I say, “No one’s ever been able to pronounce it.” “That’s probably because they didn’t want to try,” he said. “What is your name?” When I say my name, it feels like redemption. I have never said it this way before. Tasbeeh. He repeats it back to me several times until he’s got it. It is difficult for his American tongue. His has none of the strength, none of the force of my mother’s. But he gets it, eventually, and it sounds beautiful. I have never heard it sound so beautiful. I have never felt so deserving of a name. My name feels like a crown. ix. “Thank you for my name, mama.” x. When the barista asks me my name, sharpie poised above the coffee cup, I tell him: “My name is Tasbeeh. It’s a tough t clinging to a soft a, which melts into a silky ssss, which loosely hugs the b, and the rest of my name is a hard whisper — eeh. Tasbeeh. My name is Tasbeeh. Hold it in your mouth until it becomes a prayer. My name is a valuable undertaking. My name requires your rapt attention. Say my name in one swift note – Tasbeeeeeeeh – sand let the h heat your throat like cinnamon. Tasbeeh. My name is an endeavor. My name is a song. Tasbeeh. It means giving glory to God. Tasbeeh. Wrap your tongue around my name, unravel it with the music of your voice, and give God what he is due.”

Some do drugs, others go out for a run, but at the end we’re all just searching for that tiny space, perhaps a hole, that gives us shelter from the terrible reality of the world.

Race matters because of the long history of racial minorities being denied access to the political process…because of persistent racial inequality in the society… Race matters to a young man’s view of society when he spends his teenage years watching other tense up as he passes… Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown and then is pressed, no, where are you really from… Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce the most crippling thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’

You are a hurricane of a girl; remember to breathe every once in a while, do not drown within your own storm.

I asked an old man: “Which is more important? To love or to be loved?” The old man replied: “Which is more important to a bird? The left wing or the right wing?