Talk

I had a conversation with my brother today that lasted for about ten minutes. Probably a little less. It's ironic that even though he lives at home now, we still barely see each other. Maybe over breakfast, as the coffee maker gurgles and gags away by the steaming rice cooker. Maybe for a few minutes at night after he finishes dinner and I'm downstairs to brush my teeth before I go to sleep. Weekends are the worst. We are separated only by one wall one foot thick. I can hear him when he opens a drawer and when he sneezes. When his phone buzzes, I reach for mine. We never really talk, though. Hurled insults masquerading as greetings. Identical grunts of indignity at our father's lunch (and dinner) whistles. A collective sigh as we descend the stairs to the kitchen.

It took a load of laundry for us to see each other face-to-face for the first time since I enacted Operation Grouchy High School Senior, most of which involves me sulking about and hiding in my room.

How ironic. It's the laundry again. I just realized how strange that is. The last time there was a major laundry family bonding event, my mother told me the story of her mother's journey across China on foot to find her father. Of course, a sixteen-year-old girl walking across China wasn't anywhere near exciting enough for my grandmother. She just had to go and do it during the Japanese occupation. And my mother just had to tell me this story while she was doing the laundry.

These modern times are so very hard.

Anyhow, I was folding my mother's panties and my brother was folding my father's boxers, and we just got to talking about my life. Because that's the sort of thing that happens in this household. We discuss life over laundry.

I said something incredibly inane about pulling off an A in AP Chemistry for the first quarter, and he responded with some vague congratulations. He'd turned the television on, but had apparently forgotten about it. An infomercial for a pan that rotisserie-ified chicken burbled on behind him. I dug one of my father's shirts out of the laundry basket and started folding it, chattering on about how difficult school was, finally asking him where he thought I would "end up" next year for college.

I am a completely, utterly bull-headed, insensitive brat.

Sometimes, I just wish that I had been born in a nation in Sub-Saharan Africa so I wouldn't be such a self-centered idiot. I'd have to worry about malaria and other water-born diseases and whether or not the guy with the machete (fine, AK-47) down the dirt path was going to rape me. Or marry me. Or sell me. Or something along those lines that actually warranted being worried about. Instead of agonizing about a 96.6% in AP Chemistry and a 92.8% in AP Lit and where I am going to end up for college. Because it's obvious that I'm going to be able to continue on in this nice little civilian bubble of textbooks and pop quizzes and term papers for the next four years of my life.

I should be celebrating by actually memorizing these O-Chem functional groups that have been burning a hole through my shredded conscience for the past week. I should actually be annotating these plays instead of Spark-Notes-ing them the day before my exam. I should appreciate every chance that I have that he hasn't.

Because, as my begetters so kindly emphasize at every other meal, I don't want to end up like him.

Heaven forbid I should strive to emulate my older brother. It might even tear a hold in the fabric of reality.

I vainly struggled to soothe away the melancholia of this laundry conversation at the piano when I discovered that someone had moved a little framed picture to sit right on top of it, smack dab in front of my line of sight. It's a family picture of happier times in Alaska when my brother would smile for pictures and I would not. He's... sixteen? I'm still in primary school. He stands to the right of my parents and I to the left.

A wall between us.

Oh brother I can't, I can't get through.
I've been trying so hard to reach you 'cause I don't know what to do.
Oh brother I can't believe it's true.
I'm so scared about the future and I wanna talk to you.
Oh I wanna talk to you.
: Coldplay, "Talk"

One Day More

I have a battered, wooden dresser next to my bed. It has four drawers and is covered with Post-Its and drawings detailing Kingdom Animalia, arranged in evolutionary order, along with a timeline of Life on Earth and details for gel electrophoresis. The top drawer holds all my athletic gear: tank tops, mesh shirts, shorts, the stray soccer sock. The second is home to three fat plastic binders crammed full of wide-ruled paper filled with large, childish handwriting detailing tales of lost knighthood and turbulent seas. The third drawer contains my comics collection that I hardly ever touch anymore. All the plastic-slick books with their colorful pictures are gifts. One Pearls Before Swine collection is covered with numerous bling-sporting, cigar-smoking Stephan Pastises. That one was from my brother.  The fourth drawer often gets stuck; it is slightly crooked on its runners. In it are a coffee thermos from my grandparents and a few battered wide-rule notebooks, also filled with crooked script. Most of the drawer, however, is filled with scraps of paper, some laminated, some in cheap plastic frames, some crumpled and shoved far, far away from the light. Along with the scraps of paper are a few pieces of recycled polished wood and lengths of itchy ribbons in all sorts of colors, from which hang more shiny pieces of metal.

I don't really like to open that bottom drawer. It requires far too much effort to jimmy it open, and even then, what is there to see? Fancy paper with big words on them? Frames commemorating achievements of years past? Medals worn for one brief, shining moment, then cast aside as inconsequential?

Surely, the shelves above my desk are covered in trophies; honor chords and medallions hang so thickly that I might be typing under the lost Hanging Gardens of Babylon. All I have up there, however, are soccer medals and trophies from years gone by, little post-it notes from my brother on a Christmas many years ago. I can't bring myself to take them down even though my achievements have by far outgrown recreational summer leagues and afternoons scoring own-goals.

In my drawer are a Mayoral Proclamation, unopened letters of acceptance, heavy plaques of commendation, framed tokens of membership. For some reason, I like to hide them away and pretend like they don't exist.

And yet, I gave up a medical internship at USC for a chance to go off and win some more awards. How does this make any sense? Whenever I hear mention of my friends in the program, my stomach starts to crawl because I think: That should be me. But it's not. If I had been forced to make this decision a few years ago, I would have chosen the internship over anything. The medical field. That was my dream. Now? I'm not so sure. What has changed?

I leave for State tomorrow, and am looking forward to it with equal parts excitement and dread. I need to get out of here for a bit, but am not particularly keen on word-sparring with other girls for an entire week. Maybe it won't turn out like that. I hope. Right now, I have just one song on my mind.

Family

It's times like these, sprawled across my brother's bed, that I wonder what family is all about.

He comes home, and I greet him with my usual "Hi, Booger." He replies with the typical "Hey, Fartbag." His bed is so comfortable, large, soft, and squishy. It is always dark in his room. Rarely does he open the blinds. I grab a pillow and curl up on my stomach, watching as he examines his glow-in-the-dark shirt in the half-light of the room. He catches me watching and smacks me with his laundry. I shout, and he leaves, laughing. That's about all I ever see of him anymore. A minute. Two minutes. No long talks under the blankets, no more blasting alien spaceships under the pillows on Saturday mornings when I would sneak into bed with him to save the world. Now, we call each other names we don't even mean, hoping that love of the past will keep us together.

The past. It was more than just that. Everything was so much simpler. I didn't have to worry about when everyone would get home so I could retreat to the relative safety of my room. There were nights when I could just sit in my favorite corner of the couch with good old Brian Jacques and be undisturbed except for Vin Scully and the Dodgers. Before the need for large, flat-screen televisions and booming sound systems. Before endless questions, demands, rising tensions, voices. Perhaps it is me that has changed. A radical change, indeed. Playing catch with my brother in the family room with the squishy pink football, careful not to knock over the lamp. That was before even soccer and happy evenings at the park before Coach Leo got thrown out and the nights soured. Before even the radio came to gather dust on my bookshelf, before I even bought my first CD, when everything was written by hand and so felt, not merely seen. Before he died. I guess that's all it comes down to. Why, after so many years, I still think of this, I do not know. Perhaps because I was still young when it happened. Really, though, I was old enough. Thirteen is plenty old to confront death. Four years since the bloody fourth month of his fourteenth year. I am thinking dark thoughts and speaking in reverse once more. This should stop.

Rhinoceros

I realize that my last few posts have been lacking in any sort of positive sentiment.  I blame AP Bio and having too much information about plants crammed down my throat for the past month.  My mind cannot take any more of this vascular cambium, procambium, cork cambium nonsense.  (Or the Remainder Estimation Theorem and infinite series, but that is another case entirely.)

The Oscars were Sunday night, and Mr. Morris Lessmore got to take home his own little naked gold man.  Very well deserved, in my humble opinion.

My English teacher is a reedy 40-ish-year-old man with an equally reedy voice and thick glasses.  He wears a suit jacket and tie to school everyday.  His protruding ears serve the same purpose as satellite dishes-they provide my constant entertainment in class at his expense.  He also has copious amounts of body art, numerous piercings, and biker boots.  Talk about a walking contradiction.

Today, we were debating the merits of torture in the American world and fell to discussing (which, in his class, takes the form of him asking his bewildered students obtuse rhetorical questions) a potential hostage situation.  He said that if he were ever to take a hostage, his "unreasonable demand" would be "a hundred thousand dollars and a rhinoceros."  His logic ran along the lines of riding the poor animal as a tank by holding onto its horn.  When I so graciously pointed out that doing so would require him to sit on the beast's face, he quickly revised his getaway plan to include reins.  I asked him if he knew how broad a rhinoceros could get.  His Dumbo ears turned a slightly pinker tinge.  After approximately five minutes of pursuing this lively vein of thought (that actually had most of the class participating, or at least awake), he shook his head (which was now a rather alarming shade of hot pink), ran a spread-eagled hand through his already-wild-from-previous-such-occurrences-hair, and sighed, resigned, "Today's discussion about the use of force in hostage situations has devlolved into a discussion on the physics of riding a rhinoceros."

Well, I, at least, learned something from this discussion: R-H-I-N-O-C-E-R-O-S.

Missing

My brother was just out in the backyard shooting some hoops.  He asked me to join him, but I declined.  Politely, of course.  Being only about as tall as your average sixth grader, I am not much of a basketball person.    I am more of a soccer person.  Even though I'm not one of those who've played since they were first able to walk, I've played soccer for a goodly amount of years.  It would have been seven this year had I not been kicked off the school team.

I didn't sock anyone in the face, post anything stupid on Facebook, or mouth off to the coach (even though that was sorely tempting towards the end of it).  I was kicked off because I didn't "try out," having still had obligations to my cross-country team during official winter sport try-outs.  This had never been an issue before, and I was sure that I would at least have a shot at varsity this year.  The coach said that I'd have a place on the team.  She did.  And then the night after my first soccer practice of the season, I got a phone call from the new assistant coach saying that they had accidentally accepted too many people onto the team, and so my soccer career ended rather anticlimactically.  I could maybe understand that excuse for throwing me off the team, but not the fact that the coach said that I wasn't "good enough."  I have played for seven years.  I was on JV last year, and I can say with all humility that I could outplay at least three-quarters of that team.  But there I was, disgracefully relieved of duty.

I was angry, and some of the anger did come from the knowledge that I deserved to be at least on JV.  Most of the anger came from somewhere else, though.  I knew that I would never play organized ball again.  I'm just not good enough to play at the college level, and participation in a league outside of school was way out of the question.  So that was it.  No more soccer.  Period.  Was it the finality of it all that killed me?  No.

When I first started playing soccer, that very first year when I was in fourth grade, I was part of a summer co-ed rec league.  I met a boy on my team who was a year older than I.  We made it through that first season together, both beginners, both terrible at the sport.  The only picture I ever took with him was the team photo.  It's taped to the inside front cover of my old journal.

He died almost four years ago on April first.  What a fool I was.

Being on the soccer pitch after that sometimes made everything unbearable.  Sometimes I'd stare at the lonely, empty goal and wonder what on earth I was doing there, so lost, so confused.  Soccer became a way for me to work through that long process psychiatrists call "grief."  I played to remember him.  That was when we were closest, on the pitch, scuffing the matted grass with muddy cleats, being generally terrible at whatever we did.

I played all through junior high, took a year off for my freshman year, then came back and played JV sophomore year.  I got thrown around a lot, being short and all, and our coaches at the time hardly knew us, so throughout the season, I really played every single position out there except keeper, starting as a fullback, then a midfielder, then striker, then back to fullback, even though I was a born winger.  The sport became a chore.  Endless practices full of drills I had long mastered years previously.  On and on and on.  I enjoyed the touch of the ball on the top of my foot; I wore those old T90's I'd had for years even though they were split at the seams.  I enjoyed the games when there was a minimum of repetition, plenty of adrenaline, dirt up the shorts after crazy slide tackles.  I played my own game, but everyone else did too.  We were eleven separate units, each of us tugging each other in separate directions.

I went home frustrated almost everyday.  As one of the more experienced players, I felt that it was my responsibility to help guide the team, but in a white/Hispanic dominated sport, no one listens to a short, bespectacled Asian girl with a nasal voice.  I loved the sport.  I hated the team.

I guess I've come to the conclusion that getting kicked off the team was a good thing.  Junior year is a hassle, and my blood pressure doesn't need to be any higher than it already is.  But right now, when I hear my brother outside playing the sport he loves, I wish that I could suit up again, tape my socks so my shin guards won't slide, lace up my red-white-and-gold cleats, pump up the ball, and take shots from beyond the box.  But my backyard is small, my cleats are caked with dried mud, and my ball is beyond repair.  I wish so badly that I could just take one more shot.  I won't even care if I miss it.  In fact, it'd be better if I did.  Because then, I'd be reminded of what used to be.

Introspection

I am here.

Where'm I going?

So much to fear.

There's no knowing.

I write, I know

but there's so much 

I cannot show.

Memories dark,

night-dreams stark.

Whispered wails,

secret trevails.

How do I know,

that where I go,

there'll be a face,

a resting place,

that lonely space

called home?