When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

by Chen Chen

I wish I could write an elegy for my sadness because it has suddenly died. I wish I could mourn it by kissing you again & again while neither of us can stop laughing, a kind of kiss where we sometimes miss the mouth altogether, a kind of kiss I think every single dead person in every part of the world must crave with violent impossibility.

WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE A LIST OF FURTHER POSSIBILITIES To be a good ex/current friend for R. To be one last inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship advice for L. To be advice for my mother. To be a more comfortable hospital bed for my mother. To be no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time, America for my uncle, who wants to be China for me. To be a country of trafficless roads & a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go fast. To be a cyclone of laughter when my parents say their new coworker is like that, they can tell because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t, can’t be one of them. To be the one my parents raised me to be— a season from the planet of planet-sized storms. To be a backpack of PB&J & every thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming their own storms. To be, for me, nobody, homebody, body in bed watching TV. To go 2D & be a painting, an amateur’s hilltop & stars, simple decoration for the new apartment with you. To be close, J., to everything that is close to you— blue blanket, red cup, green shoes with pink laces. To be the blue & the red. The green, the hot pink.

I want to be like the kids with their plastic sleds, gliding down, all the way down the hill, then trudging their sleds & snowsuited bodies all the way back to the top. I want to be how they do this, for hours, till sunset, till some sensible someone has to come drag them away from the snow, the slope, the 3 . . . 2 . . . 1! of joy. I want to be the Anti-Sisyphus, in love with repetition, in love, in love.