Boba Talks

"Is it different back there?"

We're outside a small Californian cafe, drinking our boba teas, lounging in the sunshine. "Is it different from the US?" they ask. I smile. "A little." "Is it cold?" There is a roll of carefree laughter among us. 

Yes, it is cold. And I am back in a frigid February, trotting behind a broad back of a bold surgeon down the sickly yellow corridor of an unheated hospital. I'm bringing syringes and ampules to my grandmother, because the department has run out of those, and the way to the resuscitation room lies through the children's cancer ward. They are screaming their heads off. I remember the children screaming their heads off, because our government forbids narcotics, and the ones allowed cost too much, and the only one available is morphine, and morphine doesn't help for SHIT,  and the nurses just stand around helplessly, unable to cease the children's pain. And the children are screaming. The ampoules in my plastic bag contain fentanyl that my family smuggled from Czech Republic illegally. I am 16. 

I don't know how to convey it. So I stay silent. 

"Yeah. Yeah, it is cold. Gets to -4F in winter." I take a sip. -4. -5. People had slept out at -6 once. Snow. I remember a column of fire in a whirlwind of snow.  The protesters were burning tires to keep off the armed riot police. There was so much soot in the air the curtains in my apartment turned black. My grandma had metastases in her lungs, and she would cough up phlegm. In the protestor's encampment, there was an inner circle of thrown-together barricades, and, several feet outward - a circle of police block posts. We lived within the inner circle. Every morning I took the  subway to school, and wondered if the stations would be open in the afternoon so that I could get back home. I carried my passport in my pocket every day to show at the block post as proof of residency (they tried to keep the protestors from flowing in). I got this habit of having all my documents on me at all times ever since. I have them right here in this brown leather binder in my right pocket. Just in case I ever need to stand up and move at once. Again. 

That's another habit I find a bit difficult to justify to my local friends. 

You know, we joke a lot about my culture. I have once tried to explain what buckwheat is to them. "Shake your buckwheat! Lemme grab your buckwheat!" I laugh, as they slap the fat packets of brown grain. In reality, buckwheat is the cheapest crop you can buy in Ukraine. That's why we eat it so often. My grandma could cook practically anything out of buckwheat. Buckwheat with chicken, buckwheat with beef... And when we couldn't afford meat anymore - buckwheat with milk. Buckwheat with butter. Buckwheat with dried raisins. Buckwheat with buckwheat! Buckwheat with buckwheat for two days in a row. Buckwheat with buckwheat for three days in a row... "Sweetie, will they serve you lunch at school?"

I remember my grandmother's voice sinking with guilt, as if she was guilty of anything.It is considered a great shame for a Ukrainian lady to admit she has no meal prepared. 

And Ukrainian ladies are gorgeous. Gorgeous and generous. "Do you have the same issues with sexism as we do in the US?"  Heh. 

I remember one girl, my middle-school classmate. She had flowing jet-black hair, and velvety skin, and supple breasts too large for a 14 year old, and playful dimples that made me more uncomfortable than her cleavage. She spoke with a lilt in her voice. We were BFF, but every night I wrote stanzas that rhymed with her name. She came over to watch a movie once, wearing a mini-skirt and a tank top (in February!), and in the darkness my eyes kept tracing the outlines of her back and thighs. I gave her my entire library - my Hemingway, my Bradbury, my Richard Bach. She painted my portrait with oil. We ate ice cream together daily, and one day she sneaked into my shower stall and we kissed. Then one night she called, her voice was blubbering. Shakily, she started from afar - that she went to a house party, but she was the only girl, but she stayed anyways, and the guys made her drink, and they made her drink more, and there were many of them, and they... 

They found out about us, as much as we tried to stay disguised. And they decided to avenge the "misuse" of her female parts by stuffing eight male ones into her. I lose my flair for fancy language as I speak about it. There is no fancy language for it. 

The sun is blazing. Leaning back, I take a look at my friends' smiling, innocent faces, their neon dyed hair, their ice filled drinks; at my flannel thrown across one of their bike frames; at an ad playing in the window behind. I squint and take another sip. "It is a little different," I say. "It is a little different."