More Than Once
From the ages
of twelve to fifteen
I wore somewhere
between
twelve to fifteen bracelets
to cover the bandages
on my left wrist.
Luckily,
and unluckily, I suppose,
that was somewhat
fashionable
for that era.
I was a walking
‘Help Wanted’ poster,
hoping someone
would see beyond
the giggles and
hyperactive tendencies.
Looking back,
the public school system
requiring tetanus shots
is probably what
saved my life.
The Gift of Your Time
Sometime in college, I read somewhere that your personality is the average of the five people you spend the most time around. It stuck with me. I never questioned the correctness of the quote. In my book, it doesn’t have to be accurate to be true.
But here’s the thing—it’s completely true. And accurate.
We like to think of the human brain as a computer, but it’s actually way cooler. It’s a living thing and it’s constantly changing. We will never fully understand it, so we can never totally optimize it. I’m grateful for that. If you solve all the mysteries of the universe, romance dies.
Anyway. The brain has about 86 billion neurons, each one forming thousands of connections with its neighbors. This network is spontaneous order in its purest form, constantly modified by each moment of your life.
Every single experience and interaction you have changes the structure of your brain. You form new connections, and those connections break, adjust, and get rerouted. The aftershock of these changes can be felt all the way down to your DNA, the instruction manual for your entire existence.
When you meet someone new, your brain changes. You learn their name, their face, the things they like. You want to remember these things, and in doing so, they become a part of you. When you meet a person for coffee, or dinner, you are gifting them the world’s tiniest piece of your identity.
What a wake-up call. We’re a mix of the genes we’ve been dealt, but we are also the sum of the decisions we make.
Who have you decided to spend your life around?
childhood’s villain
Father used his fists
a lot
Though never on the kids
On the walls
and the furniture
and the doors
and the mailbox
and the fence
and the neighbors
and random people on the street
and strangers in the bar
and a few times the poor dog
and one time on mother
He was the childhood’s
villain
To defeat him one had
to become a hero
and becoming a hero
took time
And today
after all this time
the villain of childhood
was dead
He died at the hands of
some other character,
a neutral one
A cop who told him to
drop to the ground
and father didn’t
so he got shot
That was it
The end of his saga
Utterly unsatisfactory
anticlimactic
disappointing
just bad
There was no final showdown
between hero and villain
because those things
only happen in
childhood
and childhood had ended a
long time ago
rice and walnuts
“I fucking hate rice,” she
told me. “And I’m beginning
to kinda
hate you for loving it.”
“Shit,” I said, “what
did rice ever
do to you?”
She opened her purse
took out the pack of smokes
and fished one out
with her lips. “Fuck,” she said,
looking for the lighter.
“I think I still
have the pits in my knees…”
“What?”
She shrugged. “I was a little girl,
alright, and whenever I
did something that my dear grandma
considered naughty she’d
pour raw rice in a corner
of the room and make me kneel
on it and just stand like that for…
I don’t know, hours.”
“Really?”
“Really!” She blew the smoke
in my face. “To this day,
bitch still wonders
how I could steal her savings
from the pension. I didn’t
even need the money. I just hated
her guts is all. And now
I hate rice. And you.”
“Well,” I said. “I never stole
from my grandma. And to
this day I don’t hate walnuts.”
“What?”
“Yeah, that was my version
of the punishment. I knelt on
shells of walnuts just
like you with the rice. And I
don’t hate ’em.”
She blew more
smoke in
my face
