Remember Me as a Time of Day

We giggle uncontrollably about how
Nervous we are when we enter the building, and how hard my heart beats and how my hands shake when they knock at the door with their guards asking for Laura Martinez. Because she’s late on rent, and so am I, trying to hustle to pay my bills and my $4000 debt of traveling to Spanish-speaking countries. And because I love you so much and I straddle this line of propriety and impropriety and property and appropriate conversations and what’s not; beer is not. Stop it.

Scared. Scared for the next few months and how I will survive, who I am. Why can’t I balance being a good friend to all friends at the same time? Because I’m afraid I’m being judged. Because I would judge. Because I have. Because I want to be with those who truly love me. Because I’m scared. Because I’m chicken shit. Because I want a cigarette, just to calm my nervous hands, but I won’t because of how sore and raw my throat is from sneaking one in, and holding it all back. I miss poetry and I miss Puerto Ricans who make it. I miss believing. I miss truth, oh god, I miss the unadulterated beauty of truth in word.

Scared of going to Europe for weeks without you, or anyone but my overanxious mind creating stories about you and other girls and tricking myself into fucking this up because I’m scared. Scared that I’m not ready for nannies and registries and do you know how much a RING costs? Where do people get it? I just want to live. I want sand and sunset and mussels and to figure out what the fuck fucked my Dad up so much on the Adriatic coast. I guess this is the last piece of the puzzle. Spain, Italy, Puerto Rico, Croatia. I want to drink viles of olive oil, I want to sleep under the sun, I want to swim– oh to SWIM in the water, and be one.

I wanted something else; I never wanted a nine to five, I never wanted a cookie-cutter house, I never wanted to settle down and be dependent. I didn’t. I’m resisting. I still have some life to live, some freedom to use. And why do strawberries and lemon trees need to be retirement activities? Why can’t we have what we want now?

Scared of you coming home and wishing I was another self. One that wore heels and led meetings and made calls to Mexico. One that came home long after you had already rolled a J and unbuttoned your shirt on the couch with a Scotch. I’m not that girl, though she had a promising future. I am congested, and dry-lipped, and wearing the same shirt from yesterday, and hiding from the guards who just knocked on the door asking for Laura Martinez to pay her rent. I am not afraid, though, to share my thoughts with people, to chide them; to raise my own children; to get dirty; to love a messy, uncontrolled love; to write myself onto a page or a screen and share it with strangers; to make myself available; to travel through Germany on my own.

Wait a minute. I’m afraid, I say, to end up someone I know I’m not, but the fear is because I believe it’s uncontrollable. Everything is in my control. I control who I am. If I want something other than a soul-killing job, if I need something unique to my own existence, then create it. Create. We cannot forget the awe-inspiring power we possess.

“If there’s a story you want to read that hasn’t been written, write it yourself.”

Like a Rat in a Cage

Last night I went out for a few drinks at Blue Ribbon Brasserie with 3 others, all of whom are not native to these New York parts. At some point during the conversation, in which I felt unintelligent and uninformed (I had to explain what the company I am temping for does, which my drinkmates think is amazingly cool, and I think is painful and confusing), college came up. I hate when this happens. Everyone talks longingly with a gleam in their eye for the days of yesteryear when they drank beer upside down and slept in dorms of various stages of renovation. I don’t. College was purely education and 3 hour subway commutes. So I always dread the college conversation every time it comes up with transplants.

This time, however, when I tell the Boy in the bar where I went to college, his eyes open wide and he says, “So you’ve never lived anywhere else besides NEW YORK?” Yeah, Condescension. New York City — it’s not like I’ve been living in Greenbow, Alabama my whole life.

But it still brought up old ideas that I should be taking this show on the road. My New York is not the New York of my peers. And how do you explain this to the kids of the East Village? That we grew up with families that required us to stay close, and that we went to high schools that probably gave up on us long before we ever enrolled, and that financial aid was our only passport to college, and choosing to go to schools in other states, let alone other coasts, was not even really an option. I’m not trying to say that we were disadvantaged, and I’m not asking for pity. It’s just striking to me to see this difference. Maybe we are an anomaly?