Britney

After Sam falls asleep, I say to him, “Message for when you wake up: Help people keep finding me no matter how much I try to obscure myself. I have no space, I constantly feel trapped, and I literally can’t breathe I’m so anxious.” When he reads it, it will probably be early morning and I will have forgotten the urgency in my fingers tapping out to him my crowded plea. I say, “I wish I didn’t understand sometimes.” He is admittedly the one person who truly gets me and would be able to comprehend anything I told him, but our main difference is that I am fated to solitude and he is not. I do not know what, or who, willed it, but my plane seems immune to running perpendicular to everyone else’s.

He called me earlier, when I was in the kitchen with my cousin Ingrid. “Hi, cousin,” he said when I told him that she was sitting on the stool beside me, “She sounds like she cares.” She thinks the same about him.

My cousin’s house radiates the same central Brooklyn Caribbean/South American warmth of my late mother’s apartment. I live there with her and her 21-year-old daughter, who I am equally close to. My great aunt is there most of the time, and my grandmother lives a few miles away. Their dog Rambo receives the majority of my love on a daily basis. I understand the joy of holding your own baby in your arms because of him.

Sometimes I wonder how hard it would be for the childhood version of me to recognize myself. I think about whether or not they would be pleased. Maybe I am putting too much faith in a mind fresh out of the womb. I owe myself more than to trust the judgment of an elementary schooler on my identity. Even just a year ago, I thought that I was the kind of person who barely experienced recognizable change in their life; now I recognize the voluntary ignorance at play.

I tell myself to have a happy Chanukkah because I have no one to light the prolific windowsill menorah with. The compromise was worth it; I would rather practice my faith alone as an exercise in independence than reside with a false mother and accept her gaslighting in exchange for slight religious guidance.

My oil has run for far longer than most expected. Now is not the time to let it spill. ♦