f*ck m*rry k*ll
how many lives can you be?
I was almost all these people:
I am a dentist’s wife, I live in some Atlanta McMansion. I have 3 bronzed kids, curly mopped with faces tilted to the 6’ 2” sun of their warm and adoring father. We are five sets of shiny white Chiclet teeth, happy and sterile and perfect. My husband is tan and long, with eyes the color of sea glass and sandy blond curly hair that springs from his head like an exclamation point.
I am a pastor’s wife. I am married to a classically handsome man, with seamless brown skin – the type of black man they illustrate on those African American greeting cards, brightly colored and kente-patterned. He smells warm and musky; his cheek is warm when he rests it upon your forehead in an embrace. He wears cufflinks and nice suits from Lord & Taylor and has a closet full of shoehorned Stacey Adams. He has that pastor’s humor, slightly corny but the congregation laughs because they are good sheep, they love their shepherd. I am content, but stifled, and push my children in directions I’ve never gone.
I am married to a financial advisor. We live in a brownstone in Brooklyn, a fixer-upper on the cusp of BedStuy and Bushwick that we buy low so we can sell high. We have 1.5 kids (the .5 would be the cat, I can only have more than 1 kid if I make more than $500,000, that is the deal we made), collect art from up and coming Black artists, investment pieces we hang on our muted grey walls above our mid-century antique furniture. We take fabulous vacations sourced from Fodor’s, locations plucked from the worn pages of “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” (the 2003 version). We live on a strict budget, we retire more than comfortable. I am more than content; I am bored. I am nickeled and dimed until my grave. I am drowning in the feeling that I am living my life as rich reproduction of my childhood. Upper middle class Cosby bullshit.
I am married to a black guy who seems like a surfer from Cali, even though he’s just some weirdo from Albany. We eat vegetarian and blow half a paycheck at Whole Foods on locally sourced organic produce. Vacations consist of pitched tents filled with perfectly curly-coifed kids. He is an environmental scientist with broad palms with rough callouses just below his ring and pointer finger, and I am a writer, and he is the only man I’ve ever had sex with, and I seem happy.
I am growing old with a lawyer, sitting in rocking chairs on the porch. He is my straight man, wears suits to work everyday, and I am the wild and crazy one, blasting music and telling jokes. I can tell the future, especially the one I told the first day I met him and we fell in love and held hands and rapped Electric Relaxation. “He doesn’t know it, but I am going to marry him.”
I am at a family reunion in Long Island, where all these guys with pink-speckled chicken skin, Hanes beaters and red solo cups, stand around a smoking Weber grill getting drunk and talking louder and louder. I live in a sea of loud New Yorker gesticulations, long arms popping out and in like a puppet’s on a string, yelling at traffic, anger simmering right below the surface like a pot just below boil, a meticulously clean apartment in East Harlem. I am loved and adored, but also always feel the inertia of getting up too fast from a deep slumber. I’m not too sure if I should be here. I think I may have made a mistake.
I am this person: I live in the second floor of a Brooklyn brownstone with a door frame that expands and contracts when the temperature crosses 40 degrees Fahrenheit. I have a small nook kitchen with a stove that leans forward and to the right, and a bathroom that must have been constructed for someone a foot taller than me, as I can’t even see myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Just my eyes and the top of my head. I have 10-foot ceilings and three large windows that face the street below. On good mornings, when I have time, I write and meditate and dance naked in the mirror and masturbate and drink tea and go back to sleep.
***
NOTE: I this wrote back in 2014, when i was in grad school. I think about it a lot, how the people you love change you, give windows into a life you may only live, even if for a short while. I am grateful for all the people who I was, and all the people I may yet be, and the being I always am.
This is so, so wonderful.