Tiny Pantry

The waking nightmare: something kills you slower but doesn’t give you any new lines to speak with your extra time. So I go back over the old dialogue and hunt for Easter eggs.

Once in an undergrad writing workshop I prayed for a professor to make me drop to the ground and start doing push-ups till they either screamed at me to give them twenty more or to get the hell out of their sight. Either way I wouldn’t have to hear the word liminal or the phrase but have you earned that ending again. Sometimes, I just want to take space that’s for beauty and make it do work.  

Same with our wedding day. At the last minute, I asked my mom to braid my hair in the parking garage outside of the courthouse. I wore a dress that I bought with the Twin Peaks revival (and not marriage) in mind. I didn’t look like a princess, I looked like myself. It was myself that was marrying you. 

 

Even when we planned our wedding party much later, it was pieced together with patches, held at the restaurant where I worked. The kitchen boys made Korean fried chicken and handmade pierogies and kimchi pancakes. Dre made a huge vat of mezcal punch and Jaime baked a cake with the last of the season’s rhubarb. It wasn’t about if the marriage was going to work. The wedding worked. We made a playlist with Put It On Me and Love Will Tear Us Apart on it and failed to see the dual omens we were flirting with--but the ripped internet failed after ten songs, and we put Sade on the boombox instead. The Sade CD was there because the entire restaurant staff agreed to bump it during Mother’s Day brunch. We reasoned that it was the one album that every last one of our mothers loved.

The waking nightmare is that whether or not you earned this ending, it’s the one we got. In January, you will have been dead for four years. You were not always good at practicing kindness in the house, but you told me the cure for everything was to get out of the house, anyway. That’s where people loved you. Out. Driving around with extra coats in the car, picking up hacks, giving away cameras (or other people’s motorcycles) to dudes you met once. Asking a stranger for a lighter and then spending the day with them, or moving in with them, or dating their daughter, or inheriting their busted old Cadillac. So I dedicate this space to you: Not a princess. 

(Food in the Tiny Cabinet is free to anyone who’d like it for these two weeks. Please feel free to add anything nonperishable you have to spare, and please tell your undergrad students.)

Essay in which I overthink about what I have no control over so I think / and think / and think

No one can guarantee that I won’t lose another home to a fire even if I check and check again that the stove is off every time I go out / even if I unplug everything that doesn’t need to be plugged in at night like the air freshener I keep in the living room, or the microwave when I can’t rinse away the end-of-the-world type of feelings that sometimes visit me at night / and on those nights, paranoid, awake, no one can guarantee that no one will break into my apartment / pummel down the front door, chain and all / shatter the window in my bedroom that is too close to my bed and too large, too easy to jump in and out of / on those nights I triple check that I have all three locks on the front door / sometimes I wake up just to go check the door is locked / and when extra paranoid I press a chair or a heavy box of books up against my bedroom door so that I can at least hear as the intruder breaks into my room, so that they struggle for a second / and for that second I can pretend I am brave enough to run or fight back / though I am not strong / I know I’m not.

All this to say that lack of control terrifies me. It exhausts my mind and body when I can’t anticipate if something bad will happen. Or when it will happen because my mind usually assumes all the bad it imagines will be real / there is no if / it’s all a matter of when it will happen / we were as careful as we could be and we still lost our home to a fire because we had no way of knowing that our TV service provider had done a bad job of setting up the wiring outside of our home / all it took was a couple years of wear and tear and some rain-snow to create a spark.

I like folding origami aliens because I’ve been folding them for years. I know what mistakes to avoid. I know when an alien is going to tear. I know when to give up, and sometimes I convince myself that knowing when to give up is what I need. Though reimagine with me, toss out the negativity: I like folding origami aliens because I know how to work with my mistakes. I have control over the paper. Step-by-step, I can anticipate what my folding is leading to. There is no surprise, though yes, I will sometimes mess up and some origami aliens will be imperfect. Some will struggle to stand once completed, but even if they wobble, so long as they stand is what should matter. I succeeded. I didn’t have to give up. I am okay.