Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

Some are adept at this anticipation; they gain massive followings. I do not fall into this category. I am on the other side. Those long stretches of getting lost in a giant, sticky web of other people’s earlier moments.

“It’s not a lack of confidence in oneself preventing people from going after jobs where they don’t meet all of the qualifications, but a lack of confidence in other people’s abilities to view them as capable of doing the job, and therefore hiring them,”

Sometimes I think that I need to be more interested in what the powerful people are saying about the other powerful people. Then I look in the mirror and shrug. Statistically, it’s very unlikely that I’ll ever become a powerful person, so why bother?

It feels like we are doing a sort of dance, the steps for which I cannot and do not want to master, so I end it by retreating to the conversations I know how to have, and am left with a nagging sense of having failed at something.

I add it to my short list of survival skills. If you make people believe you’re strong and comfortable enough to laugh in the face of danger, maybe then they won’t eat you alive.

Everybody is busy but me. Or, I am busy, but not in the same way.

“Why don’t you cook for him, since you’re home?” my mother said. But the thought of cooking exhausts me. It was a grand enough gesture of love, wasn’t it, to follow him here?

For the first three weeks, thunderstorms that last a minute or longer, raging and gray, then sun and bright sky, like nothing happened. J comes home soaked and laughing, as though from another planet.

“I was hoping to make friends,” I say to J, back in the car. “You didn’t like them?” he asks. “It’s not that I don’t like them,” I reply. “I just don’t want to be like them.”

Don’t be afraid, he said. There’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark. Then he let go of my hand and wandered off somewhere I could not see. Come back, I said. I cried. I closed my eyes, as though the darkness I put myself in would be more bearable than the darkness beyond.

To forewarn her, I implored her to read all the books obtainable on the subject of interracial marriage. She did and found the trials and tribulations of such unions numberless; their joys, few. Yet, undismayed, sure of herself, she refused to turn back.

They make exclamations to hang out at a later date. But it is temporary. My voice sounds like another person’s voice. I talk to hundreds of strangers with it.