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

by Chen Chen

I tried to confuse God by saying I am a made-up dinosaur & a real dinosaur & who knows maybe I love you, but then God ended up relating to me. God said I am a good dinosaur but also sort of evil & sometimes loving no one. It rained & we stayed inside. Played a few rounds of backgammon.

My mother was in the hospital & she didn’t want to be her friend. She wanted to be the family grocery list. Low-fat yogurt, firm tofu. She didn’t trust my father to be it. You always forget something, she said, even when I do the list for you. Even then.

How we fell in love during jumps on his tragic uncle’s trampoline. We fell in love in midair.

Seeing you run so beautifully on the track that afternoon, I wanted you to suffocate, breath-starved from all the miles you’d run away from me.

Progress is slow. It’s like saying tapioca pudding into the phone. & the phone doesn’t work, I just want its weight pressed against my ear until my ear is sticky.

The sun sets like a science special I hated once.

With cities fueled by scars. With the footprint of a star. With the white boy I liked. With him calling me ugly. With my knees on the floor. With my hands begging for straighter teeth, lighter skin, blue eyes, green eyes, any eyes brighter, other than mine.

What is it, to remember nothing, of what one loved? To have forgotten the faces one first kissed?

First & deepest severance that should have prepared me for all others.

I wished for a place big enough for grief, & all I got was more grief, plus People magazine.

let us find what we need in this great country of burning

Aren’t all great love stories, at their core, great mistakes?

But isn’t it true, you are not always why I am happy. & I promise it is true, you are almost never why, why I am sad. You are just in the same room with me & my unsweet, uncharming, completely uninteresting sadness.

I wish it could unbelong itself from me, unstick from my face. Who invented the word “ennui”? A sad Frenchman? A centipede? They should’ve never been born. They should’ve seen me in Paris, a sad teenage exchange student. I was so sad & so teenaged,

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.

I’m envious of the clouds who can from time to time fall completely apart & everyone just says, It’s raining, & someone might even bring cats & dogs into it, no one says, Stop being so dramatic or You should see a professional.

Don’t be a stranger, but be strange. Come by often for a cup of tea, in all your unbridled unknowability.

& actually I hate how words get outdated or we outgrow them, & think you do, too, saying things like “poochie” & “good gravy,” & maybe that’s why I call you sweetie pie & you call me sweet baby, & how can we make things stay?

while you’re on the phone with thoughtful relatives, I try to sit, think nothing, but then notice dust swirling in a beam of bright, so think, as I’ve thought since mom once told me, that the light made the dust rise, dance, beautiful— when on second thought, I can see the dust was just there, just dirt, & the light only made it visible.

I try to build a bridge to my parents but only reach my mother & it’s a bridge she’s about to jump off of. I run to her, she jumps, she’s

She had almost struck down my door, asking who was on the phone, who, she had struck me, called me names, forbidden me from talking (WHO) on the phone, some boy wasn’t it, sick boy spreading his sick musky spring, American spring, beastly goo of wrong wanting.

Spring says I told my mother she was living in a dream, could never go back to the way things were. & she said, Not even here? I can’t say what I feel, here, the one place I have in this stupid country, I can’t just be, rest, I have to fight, even at home?

Spring says it doesn’t want to be personified, wants to be forgotten. Doesn’t want to be trigger for memory. Spring says it & fall are retracting their contractual smells & birds, their unlimited catalogue of liminal spaces. Fall says, Stop naming ...

They were like ellipses, master procrastinators, unable to finish things & not wanting to, they loved fooling with the point, multiplying the period . . . elongating the time . . . the words spent together

What does it mean, to sing in the language of those who have killed your mother, would kill her again? Does meaning shatter, leaving behind the barest moan? This English, I bear it, a master’s axe, yet so is every tongue—red with singing & killing.

no I don’t want anyone to die, except Cheney & racist cops & certain Wall St. bastards & the guy who called me a fag, & laughed, but they will die, & you, & I don’t want to know how the book ends, that the book ends, I should pick up the phone & call my mother, ask her about her little vegetable patch out back, if she’s planted any more eggplants

Now that you are not even the rain, what train can I take? Remember when we were morning after morning of such ordinary waiting, of hair still wet in the April light & suitcases held tight?

I will miss the particular quiet of my body, your body, opening a window to listen.

I want to be as beautiful as carrot cake.

Often I am a counterculture pistachio on casual Friday.

If you’d like I can alphabetize all my regrets but I’ll have to start from H.

My sole weakness is being the chairperson of my own childhood.

My mother collects, no, saves stamps. Like they’re her own children. But better: she can store them in a book, take them out when she wants. Love them like they’ve just been born.

In this economy of acute magpie syndrome. Where “just a hobby” is the strongest industry. & we work overtime at our reverie.

I tried to ask my parents to leave the room, but not my life. It was very hard. Because the room was the size of my life. Because my life was small. & wanted to eat candy corn instead of confrontation.

When did I first realize my parents were not infinite? That I could see the end of them? Past their capes & catchphrases?

I will try my best not to mistake you for my parents I mean my problems with my parents I mean me.

It is time to show the universe what you are capable of, says my horoscope, increasingly insistent this month. But what I am capable of is staring at the salt accident on the coffee table & thinking, What sad salt.

I admire my horoscope for its conviction. I envy its consistency. Every day. Every day, there is a future to be aggressively vaguer about.

Sometimes, parents & children become the most common strangers.

Do I love my mother? Do I have to forgive in order to love? Or do I have to love for forgiveness to even be possible?