I remember the moment I opened the e-mail attachment like it was yesterday. No, like it was a minute ago. A second. It contained a headshot of a girl — no longer a baby, not yet a toddler — dressed in a blue and white striped t-shirt with a second yellow t-shirt draped over it, so that you could see some, but not all, of the blue stripes underneath. The striped layer underneath might have been a little roomy for her, as I could see a large swath of her neck on the left side of her face but only a tiny sliver of it on the right. She wasn’t smiling. Why should she? She was looking slightly to the left of the camera, unhappy about something. Perhaps she had just been woken up from a good nap or taken from some toys she would have preferred to play with to have this photo taken. Her eyes were serious. I loved her immediately. (more…)
We moved states every two years when I was a kid: West Virginia, Connecticut, Texas, Florida. When I was ten, we settled in Baton Rouge, LA, my mom’s hometown, and my parents put me in Catholic school. I made a few friends, went fishing in lakes, had crushes on boys that ended painfully (Steven Davis, 7th grade, would sit behind me in religion class and measure the width of my Cuban-Italian ass.)
At my public high school, I transcended boredom by transcribing the lyrics to my favorite Pearl Jam songs during class while most of my friends started doing drugs. I just watched: the boys poured their 40’s out in memory of Kurt Cobain; my best friend, a preacher’s daughter, came to school with purple hair, her belly big and pregnant. We were white suburban kids, living in pristine little subdivisions called “Wedgewood” and “Shenandoah,” pissed off at something we had yet to define: there was a feeling that the world was just outside the door, waiting to open so we could breathe clean air. But all we could see was the slightest sliver of light underneath the doorjamb. (more…)
