#pensiveness

I can’t breathe when I think of everyone I miss. Dead and alive. I turn 25 next year, and I still don’t know how to hold so much ache. I don’t think I’m supposed to do it alone. But how do you turn to someone who is also hurting? I write instead. My own way of communing with the dead. 

I didn’t start writing-writing when I was young. I journaled half-heartedly. I wrote some lines for father’s day & mother’s day. I did my homework. I wrote my assigned essays and journal entries. Used the proper fanboys. And then Ms. Amreen took us, her entire advisory class, to an open mic somewhere in downtown LA and I just knew. I have something to say. I also want to connect with a room full of people. I want this. 

Sometime during an evening of snaps & whoops in between readings, I felt a hand extend towards me. And I grabbed it as hard as I could. Saving a life, turns out, can happen anywhere. 

My eyes are small with sleep and I do not care. I do not care to make them big or to see the trees with their apple-colored leaves out the window or to even read. My black rectangular glasses are somewhere on the floor, but I get up without them. I want to see the world as God intended. I strain my small eyes against the darkness of my dorm room and feel my way to the chair in front of my desk, because the light switch is too far to reach in one trip. I feel the lump of jackets draped over the otherwise hard wooden chair and I squint, knowing it’s useless, in an attempt to locate the light switch. I can’t see it, but I can remember seeing it. I move, what I assume is forward, until my hands hit the cool surface of the mirror that hangs in front of my door. I know the light switch should be on the left of the mirror and I slowly drag my left hand to reach for it. My fingers are met with a tiny switch and I flip it up. A snap goes off somewhere behind my dark brown eyes and I assume my eyes move to accommodate for the light. If I had normal eyes that could see normally, I would be able to make out the chair and the makeshift bed I slept on last night. I only see blobs. My eyes only see in smudges, but I’ve known the world in smudges for so long that I can see the chair and the blankets strewn across the carpet floor. It’s almost normal. 

You have the key to my heart

Please don't return it

- jm

There was this bus. A few boys were on it. I had four dollars in my hand and another fifty in my backpack. The backpack was on the floor, my laptop was in the backpack, and the boys were looking at me. I knew one but not his name. He didn’t know me. I’m on this bus that’s going away from home instead of towards home. I need to get off. The bus stops. I move to get up, but when I look outside the windows my eyes only see the bodies. Tens upon tens of dead beaten bodies strewn across the streets of South Central. And all I could focus on was their indecency. Where are their clothes? Who doesn’t wear clothes? I panic for a moment, and when I look down to check if I’m decent, I no longer see my backpack. One of the boys has my money in his hands. Another has my papers. But I still can’t see my backpack with my laptop in it. I need my laptop. It has my work. All of it. 

I walk slowly to the driver. The bus is no longer moving along like a bus would, it is swaying like a boat in unfriendly waters. The walk is met with many almost-falls and some unintentional gripping of stranger’s shoulders. The mothers on the bus don’t mind. I miss my mom. Where’s my mom? The bus driver is surprisingly a woman in her mid thirties with dirty blonde hair. She smiles. Despite the robbery, despite the dead bodies and the swaying of the bus, she grins. I tell her I need to go back. This was a mistake. Someone’s taken my backpack. She won’t let me off. She tells me, “I can’t. It’s dangerous out there. How about I drive you back myself. There’s no need to hurry.” I want to cry. It must be her first day out in the world. Her optimism will make it so I never see my backpack again. She must not know that we move in hurry. Hurry is our language. There is no slowing down here. 

I look out the window to avoid frowning at her and I see it. My backpack is crumbled on the sidewalk near a broken yellow fire hydrant. I point. She smiles. We keep going in the wrong direction, and then the bus driver changes. It’s another woman who also has dirty blonde hair, but she doesn’t smile. She makes an abrupt u-turn. I cling to her seat. The doors swing open and I go get my backpack. The laptop is gone, and I too want to crumble into a heap of emptiness. But I need to get home. I climb back onto the bus and there are police men with raised batons. They are yelling about theft, “Listen lady, you need to obey.” The lady is pregnant. I don’t report my missing laptop. Who would believe me? 

The scene changes and I am in a classroom. My papers are stacked neatly on the top left hand corner of my very small desk. Something is wrong. The seats around me are empty. I go into my backpack to get my pencil case. I find an all-white one. But mine is brown. I look at the chalk board and I weep. 

Sunday, Sunday

A pensive Sunday, Sunday. Much like us, this character from our Victorian-era collection of stories, poems, and wood-engraved illustrations is just waiting for her ship to come in.

More Sunday, Sunday posts.