hot toddies without lemon and honey
on a sad vacation, posing as someone else.
i wait in line at the oakland post office near lake merritt to send off a few letters to those i love in washington, d.c. and philadelphia. i just need stamps. my letters are enclosed in envelopes wider than the ones i normally use, and they feel very business-like but i still scrawl poems on their backs, like i always do. there's a large brown man -- is he filipino, i wonder -- with a loud, deep voice i think to describe as cloudy helping a tibetan woman tape up a box of uggs she's sending to germany. he's wearing his bike helmet. he keeps talking, his voice ringing throughout the post office, and no one else is saying a word. he just needs an envelope, he says, and at one point, he catches my eye and pauses and smiles. it's the kind of attention i've grown accustomed to but today, it makes me happy. my hair is short now like faye wong's in chungking express, except my hair's thicker than hers and it looks more like jessica hagedorn's all spiky and wild, or like my older brother's. he will laugh when he sees it. i've never made sense to him. i prefer it this way.
i decided that vacation, for me, for now, means delighting in the mundane. i walked into the post office and saw the line, seven people deep, and made a face, the face that people make when they see a line like that, and after a moment, chose to walk straight into it. me, as one of them. i sat at the library, amid the men with all their plastic bags who are here to use the internet, and combed through anthologies of filipino literature that a librarian helped me find, as if i had an oakland library card, as if i could go home with the books today. she copied down the dewey decimal numbers with a pencil on a mint colored piece of scrap paper -- this is how libraries are, how i'll always remember them. behind me, a man snored. later, on my way home to meet val, i fell asleep on the BART, next to all the commuters, thinking of how when i was fresh out of college, i fell asleep on the el coming back from an evening reporting excursion in frankford and how when i woke, a man was watching me and told me to be careful. but i always am.
here, i could blend in, though i felt far from myself, without my bike, without my hair, without the same ease with which i moved through the streets of philadelphia. i asked everyone for directions and when they told me to take the bus to the fruitvale stop, i asked, how much is it? but then, even he didn't know exactly. "two dollars, i think," he said (it's $2.10, in fact, cheaper than SEPTA), and when i began to root through my fanny pack, he offered it to me, his two dollars. i'm touched but i don't need it.
sometimes you go away to feel the most normal things: sadness, or rather, that particular brand of malaise without a definable cause that i know so well, isn't ruled out by vacation, just like the bitter cold doesn't rule out happiness or like short, spiky, androgynous hair doesn't rule out sexiness (but gosh, i'm still figuring that one out).
on friday evening, before val and i enter the madness that is first friday in oakland, we're walking out of whole foods, where we've gone to sneak a parking spot and purchase one fig, for me to try for the first time, when i spot the man from the post office, the one with the cloudy voice. he's wearing his helmet, and this time, he's straddling his bike. his voice rings out across the parking lot, and i glance at him real quick, tickled that i've seen this stranger twice. this time, his eyes don't linger on me. i tell val about him, his outsize presence in the post office near lake merritt and she laughs. he only needed an envelope, i tell her. (and me, what did i need?) "some people just need to leave the house to talk people's ears off," she says. and we leave the parking lot and go off into the night.
i wait in line at the oakland post office near lake merritt to send off a few letters to those i love in washington, d.c. and philadelphia. i just need stamps. my letters are enclosed in envelopes wider than the ones i normally use, and they feel very business-like but i still scrawl poems on their backs, like i always do. there's a large brown man -- is he filipino, i wonder -- with a loud, deep voice i think to describe as cloudy helping a tibetan woman tape up a box of uggs she's sending to germany. he's wearing his bike helmet. he keeps talking, his voice ringing throughout the post office, and no one else is saying a word. he just needs an envelope, he says, and at one point, he catches my eye and pauses and smiles. it's the kind of attention i've grown accustomed to but today, it makes me happy. my hair is short now like faye wong's in chungking express, except my hair's thicker than hers and it looks more like jessica hagedorn's all spiky and wild, or like my older brother's. he will laugh when he sees it. i've never made sense to him. i prefer it this way.
i decided that vacation, for me, for now, means delighting in the mundane. i walked into the post office and saw the line, seven people deep, and made a face, the face that people make when they see a line like that, and after a moment, chose to walk straight into it. me, as one of them. i sat at the library, amid the men with all their plastic bags who are here to use the internet, and combed through anthologies of filipino literature that a librarian helped me find, as if i had an oakland library card, as if i could go home with the books today. she copied down the dewey decimal numbers with a pencil on a mint colored piece of scrap paper -- this is how libraries are, how i'll always remember them. behind me, a man snored. later, on my way home to meet val, i fell asleep on the BART, next to all the commuters, thinking of how when i was fresh out of college, i fell asleep on the el coming back from an evening reporting excursion in frankford and how when i woke, a man was watching me and told me to be careful. but i always am.
here, i could blend in, though i felt far from myself, without my bike, without my hair, without the same ease with which i moved through the streets of philadelphia. i asked everyone for directions and when they told me to take the bus to the fruitvale stop, i asked, how much is it? but then, even he didn't know exactly. "two dollars, i think," he said (it's $2.10, in fact, cheaper than SEPTA), and when i began to root through my fanny pack, he offered it to me, his two dollars. i'm touched but i don't need it.
sometimes you go away to feel the most normal things: sadness, or rather, that particular brand of malaise without a definable cause that i know so well, isn't ruled out by vacation, just like the bitter cold doesn't rule out happiness or like short, spiky, androgynous hair doesn't rule out sexiness (but gosh, i'm still figuring that one out).
on friday evening, before val and i enter the madness that is first friday in oakland, we're walking out of whole foods, where we've gone to sneak a parking spot and purchase one fig, for me to try for the first time, when i spot the man from the post office, the one with the cloudy voice. he's wearing his helmet, and this time, he's straddling his bike. his voice rings out across the parking lot, and i glance at him real quick, tickled that i've seen this stranger twice. this time, his eyes don't linger on me. i tell val about him, his outsize presence in the post office near lake merritt and she laughs. he only needed an envelope, i tell her. (and me, what did i need?) "some people just need to leave the house to talk people's ears off," she says. and we leave the parking lot and go off into the night.