Roadmap of a Life
February 26th, 2008Look out.
Look out the bedroom window to the street–if it faces the street–and see it stretching like two long arms reaching forever and ever (or maybe not so far) in either direction. Let your line of sight be directed down a meandering road that may, in this corporeal world, terminate to the North, but which, some of us know, really leads West, West, further and further back, winding down through Grand Junction or up through Yellowstone past the Rockies to that body of water, a landlocked sea, dead to everyone and everything but the putrid flies and bugs inhabiting it, and the seagulls glutting themselves upon its salty shores. Let it take you further, submerge you in the Platte and then sweep you away, down, down toward Mexico to escape an invented persecution with two wives and too many mouths to feed and to Guatemala with pretensions of
Spanish aristocracy.
This is where we come from. This is where we’ve been.
Look out.
Look out the bedroom window to the street–if it faces the street–and see it running down an endless hill South, South, to terminate at a dead end breaking between houses to reveal the park where the middle school kids go to make out and smoke weed while cutting class, and watch this road stretch further in a perfectly straight line, neatly bisecting those rows of geometric towers stabbing into the sky like some monument to a hedonistic god, our collective everpresent erection aching to tear open the virgin sky and reach Heaven in an atmosphere-free oblivion: the Denver skyline rippling like rectangular waves where there is no up or down in any direction, when you are lost in the midst of the skyscrapers with no frame of reference and no visible landmarks sucking brown smog into your lungs while jostling with the crowd on every increasingly, increasingly crowded bus for standing room only.
This is where we are going, when we can figure out how to get there.
We know this.
We know it because it’s a tug on the heartstrings that makes us turn our heads every time, we know because this is where life is: where the homeless line up in a ragged formation, a mockery of civilization, humanity, jockeying for the chance at dinner and somewhere to sleep in throngs just outside the assumed opulence, the sound and the fury of the raging metal hardons, some still covered in scaffolding and crawling with little worker construction ants trying to scrape by, one day at a time. We know it because this is where the art galleries, the theatre, the book signings are: where culture and circumstance converge, clash, wrench us again and again through those well-traveled streets to plunk us down in Edge or Core, walking along catwalks with old friends (not my friends) and enjoying the free food, the free booze, the atmosphere, only to spit us back up into a tangle of thorny houses, the weedy suburban sprawl, once more.
Where are we, now?
We are here.
We are here in a place whose name means Town of Thorns, the suburb Christ suffered beneath the burden of before being crucified, the American Dream and the sins for which the mother of all martyrs bore her burden and broke her hymen bearing and for which he suffered and died (sweating blood all the while). We are here, not half a mile from three or four trailer parks and not two miles from the shitty apartment with a bed I sometimes sleep in and the man, 20 years my elder, who goes with it. We are here in my father’s house, inheritors and legacy of our parents’ sins, wondering why mama ran away and left us and took the other three she and he made, together, as if they were better, the ambitious ones who weren’t a disappointment yet and young enough to still be redeemed.
We are here in a time and place, a space and time, where it’s a laugh riot to leave a noose dangling from a tree or a doorknob, where your mother’s blood could slow and stop in her very veins at any moment and if her job doesn’t provide adequate benefits no one will pay a few cents more at tax time to keep her alive. We are here, where if you have tits and a pretty face you can get followed onto a bus or down the street or home from work while a man with a funny accent gently harasses you for your phone number and will not take no for an answer until you are good and scared, and where in the workforce you are 3/4s of a male employee on the payroll, and where the parasite sucking at the side of your uterus is a more valuable human life than you are until after it is born when it is probably a drain on society or a way to scam welfare or to try to obtain residency, because everything we women do is deception, a con game, a scam.
We are here, fed fairy tales from conception to college and then thrust into the world expecting to find Prince Charming or Prince Good Enough, He’ll Do and then wondering what went wrong when 20 years of holy matrimony goes down in a burst of fire and brimstone and blood and sweat and tears and shit-filled diapers. We are here, raised on a steady diet of literary canon, dead white men we are expected to admire and emulate, and when we do and then look in the mirror we realize that we are not the History of Western Philosophy and there is no place for a brown girl in its pages or a mainstream college course or anywhere in this world, really, because anything you try to do will always be not enough and too much and the status quo just won’t be able to bear the straw that breaks its dromedary back, and then how can you string it through the eye of a needle when Jesus worked so hard to make this white-washed suburb perfect, just so?
We are here, lusting for Colfax and Capitol Hill, chomping at the bit and shifting in our graves, still waking up but not too slowly, now. We are here, searching for love and life and meaning because the alternative, the concession that everything may be meaningless, makes life too absurd to take very seriously. We are accelerating, gaining momentum, aspiring to become photons and fly with all the nuclear glory of a supernova, continuing to shine for eons after the star has gone cold and dead and is no more.
Look out.
