I’m making a baked-potato (the fast way – microed first and then popped in the over for about 10 minutes to give the appears of crispy skin). I’m not sure why I’m making it now, I’m not hungry. My dinner: guacamole (homemade of course) and a tropical Popsicle with fruit lint – at least that’s what it seemed like “INCLUDES REAL FRUIT PIECES” the box said, but really it’s fruit lint. How many Popsicles can you make with one pineapple?
It’s been a long day and I’m tired and I miss my family or at least I miss having a sense of belonging somewhere. I’ve never really felt I’ve belonged here and for no other reason than I simply don’t. My heart has always been home or at least the openness of the West which feels like home and this – the tight trees and toothlessness of the mouths here just sucks in and in until you feel trapped in a body, in a forest that’s not really yours. Some alien living in your child, your life.
Right now, my aunt and uncle are celebrating my grandma’s birthday with dinner. And over the weekend, they celebrated my brother’s and my grandmother’s birthdays together with dinner. The obligatory place of belonging, the people you expect to do these things for you – take you to dinner and always be there, it’s hardly up for discussion you’d spend such a day with them. But I wonder if I was even there if some link would still be missing in me. Some emptiness I feed. The thing in me that snaps at the someone I love out of fear, fear of being forgotten. It is mine and holds a glove around my heart and even now I feel it squeezing.
Maybe this is why I dislike birthdays and holidays, it places so much expectation over other days that THIS DAY is more important, more special and I know that because it is mine, but DO YOU? And on these days the disappointment is hungry and ready to place blame on unmet expectations.
But I’m trying to do as my older brother did on his 30th birthday when he arranged his whole shindig – plan what I want, the way I want it, with the people here that I hope can make it – and not worry so much about the late card I know is coming, the misspelling, the always almost there and never, I’ve been interrupted not broken. I can’t claim that last bit, but I’ve been holding it. In a letter from my grandpa he wrote of a woman he knows who was abused and abandoned and those are her words. I can’t claim her particular emotional attachment to them, but I can claim my own: I’m not broken. I’m just interrupted.
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