Jun 02, 2020
Murder Nights
It was as if I needed a third surgery, a reconstruction. I needed the surgeon to rebuild what he tore out.
It was as if I needed a third surgery, a reconstruction. I needed the surgeon to rebuild what he tore out.
She sings and speaks in lewd riddles, mourning her father’s untimely death and her abandonment by Hamlet, her lover.
I wasn’t alone in this experience that had made me feel so isolated, so removed from everyone.
I’m coming to terms with the fact that—whether it ends in an unfollow or in a blow-up bash in a house in Malibu—sometimes the kindest thing we can give one another is a goodbye.
Chineseness became a part of my heritage I could name but didn’t really understand.
It was never about exercise, nor changing my body. It was about doing something my body felt comfortable with.
The grounding I felt in organized religion was substantial: the loss, acutely painful. I found temporary relief in all the ways nature found me wherever I lived.
My future was uncertain . . . A balloon dinosaur was tangible, even if it withered away in a week.
They said I was traumatized, and that my fragile mental state would have to indefinitely play catchup with my rapidly healing body.
After I left my family’s religion, I was, for better or worse, searching for a blueprint, a model I could trust, which felt familiar enough to be safe, yet bold enough to be revolutionary.
Though I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I somehow knew that both relief and release were no longer optional. They were necessities.
I see a wall as tantamount to rejection: to create a physical barrier is to reject the possibility of familiarity.
Yet, my same racial mutability also poses a threat: “How can you identify a ‘them’ if it can pass for an ‘us’?”
Each performance provided a hit of adrenal love. I lived on it. I survived off of it. Until, that is, that moment in the bathroom when I was thirteen.
I’ve read that trauma disrupts time. That violent events are recorded differently in the brain.
I recall a 2016 headline that warned, ‘Orangutans face complete extinction within ten years.’ Nash will be thirteen in 2026.
I posed the question to her, earnestly, seriously: If given the choice, would she rather gain weight or would she rather die?
Maybe my dreams were trying to tell me something. Maybe I had what I liked to call, jokingly, “the ElGenaidi Gift.”
As the plane began to taxi, the first line of the comic Riri Williams: Ironheart #1 danced in my mind: “I was never meant to fly.”
