.southern.wedding.

Have you ever noticed (I am sure you have) how freshly cut hair never falls in quite the way you wanted it to when you started. Perhaps it's more noticeable if you cut your own hair like I do, and you have no one to blame but yourself and your twitchy fingers on the reins of the hungry blades. I suspect this is why it's so easy to keep snipsnapping away until you have nothing left to obscure your prominent widow's peak.

It was just a little trim for this wedding I'm going to this weekend in the dirty heart of Texas, which isn't so dirty, and is actually rather young and hip and Bohemian, not unlike you. It is if Texas is an oyster on the seabed of the country, and in all the obesity and terrible air quality (oh yeah, and rampant racism and backwoods conservative cowboy ethos), some pearl was solidified, fortified and called Austin. The safest place for our kind is dead centre, surrounded by vast expanses of hostile white neo-natives. In fact, it's not unlike Columbus in that regard, I suppose.

My friend getting married, Sahar, constantly had a problem when we were younger: everyone seemed to want to spell her Persian name "Sarah", and you'd think that in the international community and school that we were in, a place where there were more Omers and Osmans than James or Johns, there would be some sensitivity to that sort of false typo. It even reminds me of taking a class with one of my favourite English professors at OSU, Pranav Jani: it wasn't his name that was mispelled, but the course was on Salman Rushdie, which the university printers had graciously corrected on the syllabus to read "Salmon Rushdie". We were headlong into postcolonial discourse (the Western biases of technology and its spell checks) before we had even cracked open Midnight's Children.

My friend Gianna will be there too, and is probably the main reason I agreed to go to this wedding at all. It's not as if neither of us are friends with Sahar; I think we just needed each other's presence to motivate ourselves to go.
And so, for the first time in probably a decade, our three families will all be in the same place at the same time. It feels as if it is some elaborate astrological event, but if it is scattering any tea leaves in my direction, I have done nothing more than ingest them to settle my recently poisoned stomach.

I imagine it like some ghost image of the past, blurred into the present picture. There we all are, standing in line: the Phams - 3 boys, the Bishehs - 4 girls, the Leggios - 3 girls. We hardly fit into the pictures of ourselves, and what is this business now of Sahar getting married? Is this for real?
The ghost image decays a bit, eroding slightly around the edges, not in quality necessarily, but in a more ontological sense, if that is the word. Objects begin to disappear from the field of vision, until all that's left is each of our faces, and how we have even outgrown those.

Am I ready for this confrontation? On one hand, yes. I have my clothes picked out, an outfit that was remarked upon as being "very GQ". Gianna told me that her mom is putting money on me as being best dressed at the wedding.
And on the other hand?...
Who's to say. My family stresses me out. Being in Texas stresses me out. Confronting layers of my past seems to have interesting effects on my head, a palimpsest of escapism and striving to just be enough.

Families reunited. Families expanded. Children gone. Fathers gone. It's not the same picture at all. One wonders how one was ever deceived in the first place.

July II

A flower pressed between the pages
of a book I haven't read: your way
of saying I was something else.
I call for you all night and get the same
machine. As if our bodies in infinite collision
were not enough. As if
your shoulder in the bare moonlight
could make any of it easier.
I find my way down
the block where our neighbor's
crab apple tree spits fruit
all over the sidewalk.
Then the rain in summer, how
warm, uncomfortably warm
like you in bed beside me, sweating
out your dreams.

Diner

The woman in the Chinese diner sits
two tables diagonally from me.
She is aware of herself the way
lonely people are.
I could be her in thirty years,
eating lunch by myself in
an over-sized sunflower shirt
and red pants. I want never to be
old. Each bite of lo mein
closer to my last.

.just.to.show.you.can.

I remember when I was probably about seven years old, I was thrust into all the activities a son could let down his father in. Try your best. Swimming, soccer, little league. There were probably more things, more sports. A healthy body, a healthy mind. Right? Explain jocks. Rotten minds in ripe bodies, moldy flesh in firm fruit. But not me; school comes first. Absolutely. Keep your grades up. Why only a B+? I'm talking to the teacher for you. Oh, that's so embarrassing, a mother shmoozing up some better grades for you. It's 'cause the school's so small. You can't help but know everyone. You can't help but be in everyone else's business, if only because they speak the same language. And you'd poke fun at their accents as well. You'd run around taunting the lunch lady until she cried. We sure as hell did. Maybe that's why they kept us busy with these sports. And maybe it was some semblance of familiar motions, comfortable movements, choreographed as if we were all at home across the water, where none of us would have known each other. So we'll just pretend, for the sake of it, for the sake of the charade. Were we playing sports? playing parts? And although swim team was the worst, I couldn't quit it for the life of me. I certainly tried, but it was like trying to reverse a dive back onto the starting block, a bootstrapping feat wherein it proved rather impossible to fully extricate myself from the agony. I wanted none of it. Do I totally regret it? Perhaps not. I have broad shoulders, and I suspect I have years of swim team to thank for that. I have recently found I have the shoulders of a medium sized woman, but not the hips. If you squeeze the forms a bit, we'd all resemble each other in a bit. Mold your body into the furnishings for the mind. But I also remember the guitar lessons. I couldn't have been more than, what did I say earlier? seven years old. Signed up for guitar lessons after school. Same building even. Same teachers too, I suspect. Did I know what a guitar was? Only in theory. And I had a realization a day into it: I could quit. So I quit. To what end I have no clue anymore. In fact, I think of all the good it could have done me. And yet I quit, for no other reason, I suspect, than to simply show myself that I could, that I could simply walk out that door and never have to look back. And there is certainly a story in that somewhere, should you look hard enough. A moral? None. Only lessons, once learned, forever clawing at that door to be released. Let me out! I quit! And never look back. Not until you're far enough to safely reminisce nostalgically about your regrets, insulated like a down jacket by the deadened silent feathers of all the years you put between yourself and whatever it is you thought you had quit.

July

July, like the hot breath of the dog
lazing on the porch.
I'd hole up in my room for days.
I could smell you all over
your side of the bed, right against
the wall. Even when you're gone,
you're there.