We are pond.

First, I became a crocodile, amber eyes and pale green flesh, I slithered through the hot, swampy water, my mouth gaping. All around me was the swish and flow of parting water, beneath me, sulfuric orange and emerald stones; my flesh became like these stones, these fiery, slick pebbles. We scooped them up in our white, puckered fingers and poured them all across our shoulders. They tumbled and slid, down, across our collar bones, across our breasts, down the slope of our backs. And as we laid in the steaming streams, they piled up on us, great mounds across our bellies, piling up on our knees, our shoulders. We slithered and rolled, beneath the water we could hear the stones of our flesh scrape against the stones of the pond. We could hear the pond breathing, it's slick fingers reaching out to us. And we were crocodiles; we scooped up the dark red earth, the black earth, and spread it across our cheekbones, in stripes, over the ridges of our noses, we pushed it down across our shin bones, dug our fingers in, deep, and we knew we could not leave. We were crocodiles; we crawled up against the muddy, grassy shores of the pond, and snapped up at the creatures that passed by.

Do you speak the language of the crocodiles?

They sat up on the grassy slope and watched us cautiously, we could not reach them, we crawled the muddy banks and looked up at them with our yellow crocodile eyes. But slowly, we could feel a change in our flesh that was made of stones, we felt ourselves pouring back through time, coming apart at our slippery seams and folding down into our most basic chemical forms. The pond held us, spoke to us in its gurgling voice, and we receded to the shore, writhing in the slick mud, in each others crocodile limbs, and we began the slow process of devolution. Above us the trees shivered and quaked, and we melted into ourselves, into the red and black mud, into the damp green moss, into the bright stones, the soft flow of water, we became pond. We slumped back against the clay and the stones and mud and our bodies receded deep down, into sludge, into the absolute beginning. We are pond. We became mixed up with each other, bodiless, just soft and warm and wet. We can never leave. We are pond.

Being Bullied

So, this blog is about something that actually happened to me a few months ago. It was a pretty intense experience, but also kind of weird and embarrassing and I put off writing about it for a while, and then when I did finally write about it, promptly forgot about it in the back of my notebook. Today, in my Children's Literature class, we discussed a book called Juul, about a boy who is bullied and ultimately mutilates his body piece by piece in a search for acceptance. It was one of the most intense things I've ever read, and it made me feel compelled to share this. I may no longer be a child, but this was definitely a unique experience for me, and I think there is something to be learned from it.

 

I was walking home with a feeling like iron in my bones; I don’t remember why. I came up the hill, heaved a deep breath, turned right into the twisting narrow streets where during the holidays we heard the incessant boom of dynamite, where a singed bath tub has been sitting for weeks, where once a group of kids burned a chair and left its stinking carcass in the street. I heard someone laugh, it was loud, childish. I turned down a street, there was a group of kids, teenaged girls and a chubby soft-faced boy; the boy was in the street, stepped backwards as I turned the corner and turned to make an ugly gaping face at me. He made a harsh braying sound, and I gave him a kind of skeptical half smile, the tense look that draws up my eyebrows, and kept walking. The boy stepped in front of me. I tried to edge around him, and the girls poured out all around me in this awkward surreal kind of stream. I was looking down at them, they were either young or small or both and were united in a strange unspoken agreement, an instantaneous decision, to be whimsically cruel. There was a flood of sounds, ugly irony, their faces contorted in blind hatred, they got close up to my face, just barely resisting touching my skin, they screamed in mirthful glee, pulled apart my body. An older girl with a Monroe piercing and dry skin stuck out a finger, jabbing at my piercing, ¿que es eso?, she demanded with her mouth loose and wagging. Un piercing, como tienes tú, I finally said, the words coming incredulously from my tense, guarded smile. I guess it broke the spell, I pushed my body forward, finally resigned to move past, to flail if I had to, and they pulled back from me in reluctant, stubborn little steps, crying, ¡un aplauso! and clapping and howling as I walked away.

As the clatter faded behind me, I walked home listening to my breath. My face sighed down, anxious smile erased, I bit my lip and marveled at the silenced that roared in my hollowed out body. I got home, climbed the stairs, sat on the edge of my bed, and cried resentfully, struggling against each silly tear.

It’s strange to spend your life in a self-aware position of cultural dominance, with that history of privilege, that shameful advantage of being a white, middle class American, to be aware of that horrible dark thing, historical cruelty and repression, with all it’s echoes and ghosts, and to live all your years with the knowledge that you will never experience this twisted thing that you are implicitly and helplessly destined to be a purveyor of cruelty. It’s strange to be taught that this feeling is something you have no right to experience, and then to turn a corner one vulnerable day and be confronted by exactly that.

It’s strange to find yourself in a place where nothing you do is the right thing—your words are deformed, uncertain creatures, violence will only turn around and eat you up, silence is weak and indefensible. So, I cried on my bed, and then tried to breathe and felt quiet and lonely and strange and bad, and counted my limbs and my unbroken skin, and breathed and sighed and went downstairs, and found a new way to walk home. And then I cried more and felt weak and helpless and lame, but at the same time, hesitantly satisfied, because I’d glimpsed the nauseous thing a white American never thinks they will touch, and maybe there’s something to be learned from it, maybe this little piece of trembling, blurry nightmare day will be useful to me in that endless process of becoming—becoming a whole person, a better person, a worthwhile person, a new, never stagnant person, a changing, continual self.


Comic relief:

(I would prefer to use the scene after this when the guys are telling their parents about the incident, but I couldn't find it.)

Festival del Dragón

 

At home we cook the worlds speediest pasta, running around the kitchen, drinking more. We eat out of the pot to avoid dishes, pile our shit into the car, and I’m buried beneath a huge blanket in the back seat with a baggie of MDMA in my underwear, the music up, it feels like we’re flying through the streets, through the dark, towards Santa Fé. In the distance there are little clumps of light and the faint resonance of bass. We take a sharp right to avoid a police check point and pull off to the side of the road.

The Dragon festival is a sparkling circus, a grotesque city of lost souls and free souls and everything in between. Faces loom in and out of the darkness, costumes and paint, eyeballs wide as plates, I feel safe bundled up in my polar bear hat. People touch my head, growl at me, laughing. We go floating form tent to tent, where I hold my hand against my chest and feel a beat that is my own heart all mixed up with the rhythm of the music, and it’s the same exuberant boom in everyone’s chest, in everyone’s loose limbs. We eat up exhilaration, from plastic bottles, bitter fingertips, through rolled up bills, we become infinite, we share, we sweat, we dance, we hold on, we let go. Faces loom in and out of the darkness, big gaping smiles, a strangeness that feels soft as skin. I feel my body in every place, I feel me, and you in every pore, I feel my soul hum.

We are under a big canopy dancing with our arms up when the sky becomes the faintest purple and the sun begins to roll up, beneath a layer of thick fog. Trash begins to emerge from the mist. We sit in the first weak rays of sunlight and watch as the landscape appears, a strange dystopian shire. The music persists, but we wander away from it, boots kicking up whitish dust. We sit amongst the olive trees and look at our hands and look at the clouds, and watch each others’ eyes expand. All around me is a serious murmur; they talk about growing up, about ideal childhood, about rebellion and drugs, about moderation and excess, about the revolution that must begin with education, but all my words are sealed up inside of me. The sun is up now, Borja falls asleep on his back, I pick little bits of grass and watch the ants scuttle busily across the cracked earth. Matteo says the olive trees look purple, and I curl up against him, curl up inside my hood.

Back at the festival, the dogs have returned to their instinctual selves, roaming in dusty, playful packs. I stop every few feet to say hello to them. There is a droopy faced old bulldog, there is a beautiful white-gray husky mix chained to a van, there is a tiny fluffy German Shepard pup being carried under someone’s arm. We see familiar faces scattered all around, exchange hugs and smiles. At the car we eat orange segments and pass around a big plastic bottle of water. There is a short shirtless man standing alone against a truck across the street from us. He looks a little lost, he keeps looking over in our direction with a vague smile, shuffling his feet. I walk over to him and offer water, and he laughs nervously and gulps it down, grateful. A red car drives past and shouts at me, “¡Oso polar! ¡Súbete al coche fantástico!” They rev their engine. A moped stops in from of me. They like my hat. They flash big golden-toothed smiles at me.

We wander, wander, wander. I talk to a boy with a painted face, to see if he has any paint, but he’s lost it. He’s Lithuanian and has yellow eyes like a lizard. He sits with us and we stare and he says, “Natural, natural,” and follows us until he comes across a shirtless man throwing himself around in the street and the Lithuanian lances himself with a gleeful whoop and they begin flipping and leaping and tossing each other to the music. We find Adri, still dancing, shirtless, furious, ecstatic. I’m covered in red paint, all down my right arm and my t-shirt and my sweatshirt. We wander and wander.

Eventually, we are hot and Borja is wilting, so we pile into the car, up to our necks in sweatshirts and blankets and we cruise home, a little anxiously. It’s strange to watch people, walking along the streets, their clothes bare of dust and paint, their faces void of wonder, their destinations somehow certain. Outside the house, I’m unloading beer from the trunk, stained and dusty, still wrapped in my polar bear hat, and a neighbor passes by, a middle aged man in a button down shirt, and he seems like some strange surreal portrait of normality, of the bland nature of reality. In the house, we curl up on the couches, and giggle vacantly at Charlie, delirious and exhausted, but humming with left over adrenaline. We take lazy showers and eat slowly with chopsticks, just because. Over thirty six hours pass without sleep, and when I finally go to bed, it’s because I no longer want to keep my eyes open.