HAPPY THANKSGIVING.

wishing everyone a tomorrow that's filled with turkey/tofurky, close friends, and a giant, food-induced coma.

Fertilizer. ...another one, dug up from roma.

“Marcus Eugene, if you don’t stop eating that shit, I swear to God, weeds will grow in your stomach. Dio mio, get in here. Prontissimo.”  Marcus, a nine year old legend-in-his-own-mind, is the weirdest kid I have ever met, hands down. No contest. To make matters worse, his sovereignty betrays a soreness that only a fellow displaced person like me would recognize. Being shipped off to his grandparents’ house year after year, summer after summer, is a tick for poor Marcus, a burden that could grow for him in ways that his father doesn’t recognize.

For that reason, I personally wouldn’t use the word “shipped”, but I’m sure that’s how Marcus interprets the situation. His Italian is abysmal, there’s no hiding it, and I imagine that he must feel overwhelmingly lonesome here because of it. From my window, though, I quietly get the impression that he’s accustomed to time spent by himself. This kid is crazy, you understand.

Presently, I should tell you, Marcus’ favorite color is turquoise. With gusto, this kid’s favorite color is turquoise; it’s all he wears. This morning, his favorite color, paired with his grandmother’s love for gardening, finds Marcus face to face with the most magnificent fertilizer he’s ever laid eyes on. You know that blue garden stuff that you spread and it looks like colored feta cheese? Yeah, dude’s eating that stuff. Just because it’s turquoise. But his actions, in my opinion, if scrutinized, run deeper, too. He’s sitting solemnly on the curbside, humming to himself…completely unaware that anybody would, or ever could, watch him.

It isn’t that he doesn’t love Rome. No, that isn’t it at all. Marcus is weird, but he’s also a brain, a fervent historian at just nine years old. No, in truth, he prizes days that his grandfather spends showing him the historical sites of Rome, camera death-gripped in hand and ears wide open. I know because I see him. I know because I know his family.

The pictures he takes, summer after summer, wind up painstakingly collaged on the guest bedroom wall, the room that only sees permanence in those photos, a makeshift map of Rome. Without question, Marcus is extraordinary. I know it.  It’s just that he’s so terribly aware of his foreignness.

Shielded by childhood’s purity, the only thing he knows to be a transnational attraction for people is greenery, and I think that’s lovely. Flowers, sunshine, trees, warmness, all of the bliss and warm creatures that foliage draws near to it. Why doesn’t Signora Romano see him clearer? For sure, he’ll ignore her until she busies herself with something else; he is not meek. From across the street, I’m watching his favorite color, the fertilizer, take root in him. Fields and fields of green surface, and I’m watching all of the birds, bees, butterflies, and loveliness swarm him, only they’re not those things. They’re spray paint, dirty children, old women shoppers, and people enjoying their lunch breaks. In this moment, as I watch him struggle to be treasured, I’m wholly aware of the fact that he fits in better here than anybody has ever fit in anywhere.   

che bella.

a few pictures that have been inspiring to me lately.

cher sign elicits giggles. 

Lake Michigan. October, 2011.

translation: rome is eternally in me. OR, rome is eternal in me. I like that one better.

a JFRC throwback.

the vatican, at christmas.

a gem.

lion king?

elasticità

pizza capricciosa, per favore. "capricious".

photo cred: kim bernie. success in capturing the great beauty that is cincinnati, ohio. 

 i've been doing lots of writing lately, hopefully to be shared here very soon. these pictures are set in a combo of chicago, roma, and ohio, just like me. a very huge shout out, by the way, to my dedicated foreign readers. hungary, germany, latvia, and russia, i love you!

szeretlek

Ich liebe dich
Es tevi mīlu

я тебя люблю

ciao, belle. ti amo. 

Temporal Lobe

         He writes music.  Ever since he was little. Lately, he sits in the park behind his house, interminably spinning on the tire-swing.  He is, truly, a gifted composer. But he hates the attention. And it’s possible that the only thing he hates more than the attention…is music. And when somebody hates something that much, it doesn't matter if he’s gifted.

And he wishes he could use all of his senses equally. See, he exists in a haze, everything obscure, everything murky. But he hears things loudly. Everything rings, and his muscles grow tense, and his blood gets thicker, and all of his weight sinks down into his heels. Because his brain feels flexed, and he wonders why people only ask him about music.

He’s gone through a lot of favorite places, but the tire-swing, so far, has stuck the longest. Eventually, they all get somehow tainted for him. But the blurred circles, for now, as he spins, make his head feel normal. His world, in these dear and hushed moments, somehow merges with reality.

He puts his feet on the ground, through the hole in the tire, and he stands up, brushing the snowflakes out of his long, wavy, and dirty brown hair. He slowly walks home, taking the crafted trail he’s been working on for months, through the woods, to his house. The ground is frozen, and so are his toes. He notices that he’s starting to wear through the bottom soles of his Converses.

He gets the mail, unconsciously flipping through it without registering its contents, trudges up the driveway, and unlocks the front door. He’s happy that he missed the mailman in the park today-- he parks there to take his breaks. But everybody knows that the mailman’s a pedophile, so the park is really no mystery.  Once inside, he kicks off his shoes by the heating vent, lights the pumpkin spice candle on the kitchen table, and flips on the free Christmas DVD that his stepmom got for buying a sofa at the Pottery Barn. He turns it on, even though it’s February. It’s already six o’clock, but nobody will be home for hours, so he chooses a microwavable dinner from the selection in the garage freezer.

His high school forced him to see a counselor last year. They told him that they were fretful for him, because he’d begun to pull away from his friends. It’s funny, really, because his music got way better. He wasn’t depressed, like they thought. It’s just that he’s accustomed to isolation. He hates that loneliness has a negative connotation.

He thinks it’s ironic that, for his whole life, ever since he was little and in grade school, people have told him to not do drugs. But the first thing they told him, when he got older, as a supposed outpouring of care and concern, was to take a pill. A pill that would help all the badness fade away. Really, he wasn’t sad. But he took them anyway. It seemed easier. In fact, he found them laughable because they, the pills, made him feel nothing. Not even happy. A flat line. So he stopped taking them. His name is Jeremy.

He loves school, but he’s not good at it. Easily distracted. He’ll graduate this year, though, and he’s aiming for a perfect attendance record. In three years and five months, he has never missed a day. Even when he was sick. Already accepted to three universities, he adamantly does not want to go to college. Maybe, though, he’ll go to the one in Delaware.

Last weekend, he went to his aunt’s birthday party with his father. It was held at her new boyfriend’s house. Customarily, everybody drank and smoked, until a unanimous level of wasted-ness was achieved. Except for Jeremy. He doesn’t drink. It was okay, though, because, throughout the lunacy, his transgendered, male-to-female cousin spontaneously decided to entertain everyone by passionately performing Cher songs on the karaoke machine.  His father was outwardly vocal about his discomfort. But Jeremy, for the occasion, was calm, fixated, and inspired, listening to the music, her singing. She was striking, sporting a sleeveless, satin purple gown, wearing a generous portion of brightly-colored eye shadow, her light hair pinned back, but draping her shoulders. As it happens, Jeremy isn’t gay or transgendered. He just figured that she, his cousin, was the most honest human being in the room. 

Earlier this week, he got his cast off. At his stepmom’s annual New Year’s Bash, he wasn’t paying attention, and he tripped, falling down the stairs, into the basement. Fourteen stairs, to be specific. He’s been counting them since he was little. It broke his arm, and he got a white cast. But he colored it black with a fat-tipped permanent marker. The smell almost got him high a couple of times.

Because he was still wearing the cast at the birthday party, though, his cousin asked him what had happened to his arm. He told her, as he’d been telling people for weeks, that it was a battle injury. She’s about the only one that ever smiled, laughing at his joke. And he asked her what bathroom she uses when she goes out in public. Again, she laughed, pleased to have found a familial ally, capable of being just as honest and outspoken as she is. On the car-ride home, his dad asked him if he was a homo.

He walks to school every day. Even when it’s cold, and even though he has a driver’s license. He can’t afford a car, and taking the bus is disgraceful for an upperclassman. Plus, people always try to talk to him on the bus. Stupid, petty things that waste his time, making ugly clamor. To him, it’s not worth the noise, especially if it’s not, at least, even moderately pretty.

He’s scared of drugs and alcohol, different than most of the people around him every day. He believes that they make you weaker, creating splinters in your brain’s crafted and evolved walls. He’s afraid of bad things seeping into those fractures. This theory has been developed, over the course of the past few years, with Wayne, the homeless man who sits outside of the Shell gas station on his way to school. Jeremy thinks that the dirt caked into Wayne’s wrinkles makes his motions louder, his existence heavier, his skin an instrument.

Almost to school, he passes an elderly gentleman, outside of a coffee house. He’s disheveled, rugged, and unclean, slowly tottering with a walker, clearly judged and gawked at by middle-class suburbia. It makes him sad, because he always liked that coffee house.

People turn away, covering their noses, and Jeremy realizes that there are feces running down the man’s leg, staining an already filthy pair of red sweatpants. And he’s not wearing any shoes, frailly scuffing along with pieces of cardboard haphazardly tied to his feet with pieces of twine. And the pain must be excruciating, his feet mangled and leaving bloody footprints on the sidewalk, making sticking sounds in the February cold. People bypass him quickly, avoiding eye-contact. And the tennis balls on the front two legs of his walker are worn too thin. It all echoes with brutality. And Jeremy can’t keep the tears from pouring down his cheeks, because this is a tragedy. Relentlessly blaming the victim, perhaps better captured as a survivor, he thinks that the human race has a duty to itself to do better. Jeremy hears the man’s watch ticking, and it’s too slow. It’s deafening. 

He stops in his tracks and turns around, going back the way he came. Today, of all days, he deems himself too delicate to attend school.  Distracted and not composed, he walks to the park. He spins on the tire-swing until he pukes up his breakfast. And he prays that the man will be alright. Even though he doesn’t know who he’s praying to. And for the first time in awhile, he gets up from his swing, to instead walk the park’s path, shaped like an eight.

He thinks it’s really terrible that people in this country are so neurotic. Always thinking that people are coming, ready with really big sticks, to beat them. They’ll all take advantage of you, you know. The end is nigh. It’s a shame, Jeremy thinks, because it’s ruined them for compassion.      

And, after a long time, he smiles. Because he’s decided that he will not go to a university to study music. Maybe, after all, he will go to that one in Delaware, but only, only to study literature. Something new, not something that he’s already equipped with. Something that will resound with novelty and resonate with daily challenge.

Because not everybody can be a hero.

Teeth

           I yank my MIT sweatshirt’s sleeves down over my fingers, pulling my thumbs out of the holes I chewed into the sides of them. I grip the tattered cuffs in my hands, and I scrunch them into fists. I’ve, to the best of my ability, sealed myself in, hood on, drawstring pulled. My sweatpants are tucked into my tube-socks, and I feel nostalgia creeping up behind me, because I’m wearing the sneakers that I've kept stored at this park since I worked here, during my high-school summers. There are still blood stains on the inside heels, I traced them with my thumbs before I put them on, and my right big toe still sticks out of that one, ever growing, hole. A long time ago, I calculated that these shoes had trekked over 170 miles on trails. I wonder what that number is now.

 I’ll turn 38 this year. For me, this is a fact that internally fosters both pride and panic. Pride because of accumulated insight and achieved goals, but panic because, not too far from now, I’ll be existing in the “falling action” portion of the plot diagram. I laugh and throw my hands in the air, because only God knows what my “climax” will be. I’m a Senior Chemist at Dow Chemical in Boston, I graduated from MIT in 1997 with honors and a degree in chemistry, and I have a son, named Liam, who is twenty years old. I had him when I was 18, just out of high school, and becoming a young, single mother was a life experience that outfitted me with apparent portions of empathy, resilience, and deeply-seeded motivation. I work in the biopharmaceutical division at Dow, promoting efficiency and progress, one prescription at a time. It’s ironic, really, because medications make me paranoid, and I adamantly refuse even ibuprofen. But, I mean, who knows? Maybe that’s not ironic at all.

In any event, every year, my work gives me a mandatory, month-long sabbatical, and I always come here, to Smugglers’ Notch. I had my choice, as a high school student, as to which Vermont State Park I wanted to work for, but none of the other parks’ names could even remotely compete in magnetism. My decision-making skills were, and still are, disconcerting.  

Twigs are snapping, leaves are crunching, and I cross my arms over my chest to keep warm. I see my breath, I try to construct a picture-memory of the morning fog, and I close my eyes as I walk, because I know this path. I recognize the smell of the wilting Red Maple leaves, I spot a Luna Moth, and I pass Sterling Pond, before, finally, I find Bingham Falls. I take a seat on the ledge, with my feet dangling over the edge, and I remember back to summers-gone-by. Those were the finest summers of my life thus-far, spent outside, alongside kind-natured people.  

I rent out the same yurt, each year, when I come here in the autumn. A yurt is a pseudo-cabin, but defined as a habitable tent. The ones here aren’t as nice as some that I’ve seen, but, even still, they’re outfitted with bathrooms, kitchens, and heating stoves. Smiling, I remember having to describe them to campers who inquired about staying here on trips. Yurts come from Central-Asia, they’re circular, their foundations are formed out of latticed, wooden planks, and they’re portable, invented by and formerly used as homes by Turkic nomads. Technically, the ones at Smugglers’ Notch aren’t portable, but that’s neither here nor there. It always takes me a few days, when I first arrive, to figure out why I like it here so much. I am, by no means, a “green” human being.

My son, Liam, is the exact opposite of me, in all possible ways. He dropped out of high-school at 16, something that struck with the force of a cartoon anvil the following year, when he went on to earn his GED at 17, an entire year ahead of his former classmates. I dragged him, begging him to consider universities, and he resolutely rebuffed all of my attempts. Every single one.

Once, I flew with him to Oregon, to look at Portland State University. My beautiful and brilliant son refused to even get out of the rental car when we pulled up. He took one look at the school, declared all of the students to be “hipsters”, and disavowed the entire west-coast. The only friend he made on the trip was an elderly woman, who happened to be sitting outside one of the restaurants that we ate in one evening. She was a weaver, dressed in rags, sitting on the sidewalk with her loom, hands always in motion, colors sprawling. Liam was captivated by that woman. He was drawn to her, even though she was so old, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was because I was always so young. Watching him watch her was colossally poignant to me, compelling me to realize that elaborate schooling would not be his path, although it was mine.

Steadfastly, he rejected institutions, and he now works and lives in Uganda, employed by the Invisible Children movement. He is living a life that makes me shudder with pride, even though I find it confusing. His bravery abounds, but his independence is sharply painful, chilling even. As his mother, I know where he inherited it from, and it’s akin to looking into a mirror. Autonomy, jet- green eyes, and relentless fidgeting are our only shared qualities. I haven’t spoken with or seen Liam in over 15 months.  By instilling ambition and individuality into him, I unknowingly insured that I would never see my son again. My care for Liam is an area of my life that I refuse to share with other people.

My first name is Sylvaine. It’s French, and it means “of the forest”. It is transparently fitting here, in this park, where people call me “Sylvie”, but its blatancy morphs into an opaque and cavernous reality when applied to my life in Boston.  At home, I am a woman who has a glare that can cut, a ferocity that can cause blood loss. It's a front that always melted away around Liam, but it's ever-present in my day-to-day setting. I am a woman, somehow foreign in my own home.

A quiet soul, I talk only when necessary. I’m a firm believer in the theory that words used sparsely are words used mightily, and I am always dressed in black, typically a pencil-skirt, usually paired with threatening, pointy-toed stilettos. I have a Chinese calligraphy tattoo, one that I got when I graduated from high school, and it goes vertically down my left shoulder blade. I can just see it if I look over my shoulder, and it, harmonizing with my clothing choices, doesn’t buy me many friends in the scientific community. An accepted hurdle. Notably, I’m a scientist, but MIT and Dow were mostly just to prove to myself that I could. Purposely, I am stand-offish and brisk. My hair is a deep, dark shade of brown, and it's curly and long, reaching all the way to my lower back. I always wear it down, but usually flung over my right shoulder, exposing my tattoo. Showing it never, ever gets old.    

When Liam was young and I needed to bring him along with me in my daily activities, we were a stark and striking contrast to one another. My tattoo and dark features, teeth standing out against my sinister lipstick, distinctly countered his pale, innocent, and creamy complexion. Blonde-haired and wide-eyed, he offered a contradiction to my appearance, teaching outsiders a lesson by seeming to be dissimilar and separate from me.

I told you about my sweatshirt, how it bears chewed-out thumbholes. Admittedly, that’s a common characteristic of most of my articles of clothing. Chewing is my choice form of fidgeting. Especially when I’m concentrated or focused, dissecting or illuminating something significant to me, I chew on my sleeves. Liam does it, too. For that reason, I do not wear long-sleeves to work, and I always, when he was young, outfitted him with layers, the lowest one consistently short-sleeved. That type of restlessness can be ill-interpreted. As I sit here by myself, in the morning chill, in this park that means so much to me, I realize that I’ve outgrown the sleeves that once kept me warm. I live in two worlds, and, accordingly, nobody truly understands me in either one.

For, if they don’t understand my silence, they will never, ever understand my words.