All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life. —Franny Choi

How unbearable it is to desire what another person can deny you.

Meeting Tig had made my own life slow and thicken, seem for the first time worth noticing. For the first time I felt as though I had stories to tell, once I had her to tell them to.

this made me weep, friendship is so special

What I recalled most clearly from that class was my own reaction, the fear and discomfort that revealed to me where my loyalties lay, how I believed change should happen: civilized, inspiring, with speeches, without blood. With perhaps a modicum of fairness for people who had not made the cruel machine that was now being bludgeoned but tried to look out for themselves and live, run the train cars of their lives on the tracks laid out before them.

This is what my parents wanted for me, what everybody wanted. To be a dish laid out before a man’s hunger. To be taken, to be quiet. Disappear into hair and parts. Disappear, in time, into marriage and motherhood.

I did not know how to explain this stubborn love for my parents that I staggered under, iridescent and gigantic and veined with a terrible grief, grief for the ways their lives had been compost for my own.

To shame me for wanting what I had been taught to want seemed like a callous cheat, a wanton shifting of goalposts.

Talking to y’all has got me thinking, for real. I have bigger dreams than running from place to place, trying to survive. It’s what animals do. Spend their lives desperately looking for food and shelter. Black and brown people in this city, we are just animals. Hunted down. I know, I said, though I did not. I added, I’m so sorry. There has to be a better way, Tig said. I’m going to think on it. I’m a philosopher. It’s my job.

My only job was to study, I was told. To do well. Graduate with distinction, secure a decent-paying job. Success at these had been met with no celebration, only a transfer of expectation to the next desired milestone: marriage and readiness for it.

Okay okay okay, I said, having watched enough episodes now to understand that composing the idea of a dish that performed well on a show like this was simply a matter of attaining fluency with a certain kind of language. Perhaps this adaptability, this ability to read a situation and accommodate its needs, was one of the only things I had a halfway solid aptitude for, I who had grown up on the other side of the world, and still squared my shoulders and walked into the dyke bar, trusting I could find my way.

My friends all would leave me behind in life, one at a time. That was one reason to choose the traditional route. Find your own person to go off into the world with, take your place in the expected order of things.

What does it mean to be investing in my mental health? To be healthy? Show me a healthy person!

All my life, when I imagined the future, I thought of each of us as small atoms, individuated, settling down, getting a flat somewhere, wearing out one job and then another, like successive pairs of shoes. You grew up, you were found a person to marry, you went sullenly to work, you kept a house running, you did the requisite paperwork or paid the price, and then for two hours of the day you might cultivate a pastime, like yelling at sports on the television or forcing the lawn into submission. It took a bravery to imagine something even slightly different, let alone follow that imagining through.

How was anyone expected to dream loftily about the future when the present ground them down to powder and nothingness?

It doesn’t do to dwell in fantasy, even if your only fantasy is that you end up a normal boring person: wedded, safe, loving, loved.

What nobody told me when I was a very young person was that obedience, fearful toeing of every line, chasing every kind of safety, would not save you.