the brother we are all looking for

I curse the number twelve. I’ve skinned my left knee twelve times, gained twelve pounds too much over winter break. Twelve goldfish have died in the glass bowl in the living room, and twelve household plants have struggled to survive, their tendrils yellow and wispy. Twelve years after my brother was born, I arrived into the world as a naked newcomer, useless like all babies, eating, sleeping, only capable of nesting into the crook of a soft arm. So weak that even my own mouth could not stay closed, drool dripping down an unformed silver of a lip. And he was on the precipice of puberty, shoulders broadening and voice deepening, the small and skinny body be- coming more and more unrecognizable.

These are twelve black years. I am blind, deaf, and mute. Vibrancy is lost without the senses. The parties where the body surrenders itself to music and faith, the tender kisses given and taken in messy bedrooms, the silly fights resolved within hours, the dizzying eruption within the brain after it has read poetry for the first time, the restlessness of a summer basketball game. I cannot even begin to form in my head what these feel like. All the adjectives you have used to describe these vibrancies, these moments, are yours, not mine. I have simply put my hand out and you have traced remnants of these impermanent vibrancies in your palm, over and over. I have memorized the tracings, desperate to feel memories that have been lost forever. But these are crude imitations and substitutions, second-hand happiness that wear down and disappear over time. I was never there.

The age gap gives and takes. Although he gives me piggy back rides and pats me to sleep, my chubby-legged seven year old self still looks up to his tall, wavering frame, which is far from

my hands’ reach. Our relationship is as distant as it is close. Instead of covering up each other’s forbidden late-night escapades, he will try his best to make sure I am at home, bundled up in bed, safe. Stories of marijuana and alcohol and all the lovely substances parents do not want to hear about stay untold. There is no blackmail to expose on each other. Messy last-minute essays are not written for the other. Trading chores does not exist. We arrived together hand-in-hand at elementary school parent-teacher conferences. He was the parent.

---

I got out of my classes after dark. The world was black and the street lamps made shadows that looked like big hulking men and slinking women. But my brother was there, waiting outside of his humming silver Acura, his white shirt a little transparent from his sweat, presenting me with a smile that made me know I no longer needed to worry.

---

I can hear him on weekday nights. Sheets being thrown onto the floor, hollow cups clink- ing and getting filled up with tap water, soft jazz melting into the room. The sky is orange and he has started smoking. It, all of this, will hopefully leave him in a trance.

He cannot sleep.

He hasn’t been able to for many years now. I can only imagine that his day has been cold. Up in the South Bronx my brother first learned what it felt like to be surrounded by inky rage, by people who hate you and what you stand for, whether you like it or not. These days, after scoring a well-coveted transfer, he spends his time in smoky subway stations and in the crowded streets of Times Square, helping lost tourists find their way to M&M World.

No more black, stony faces with subtle guns hidden under the waistbands of jeans, the creeping fear that in the decay of Charlotte Street you are not in power, and that the blue on your clothes brings trouble, not respect. You are a target, looking stupid in your silly little uniform. Work makes you feel like you are wretched, so unimportant, enough to be not just disliked but forgotten and ignored, but there are ways to escape it when you can. The law is on your side. Once you leave the Bronx civil, complaints get dropped. The boys who call you names always seem to have marijuana on them. The slightest violation, the flick of the wrist, the punch you can land without consequence. Someone calls you a “chink” and you take your nightstick and you beat him, over and over, and the wonderful part is that this slips by when you leave the Bronx because it’s a dying necropolis everybody dislikes, that everybody forgets and ignores.

--

You see the handouts these people just love to get and the jobs they refuse to get. You, who have also relied on handouts of your own, would feel for them, but they sit around and complain and you are shocked that even with Affirmative Action these blacks still will not work. They will still eat up your paycheck and weep for social justice, writing poems and attending protests, while your parents work their fingers down to the weathered bone; skeletons that could not die.

This is how I imagine his day is. I weave these scenes with the hints he unconsciously throws out. I can tell. The surface details suffice. Fuck the cops. His voice wavers when I bring up the latest police brutality video that has been uploaded onto the Internet. Fuck the cops. Welfare budget increases anger him. Fuck the cops. Two brothers enjoying their lunch break have been shot and killed because of their blue uniform and one of them is Chinese-American, and he looks like you. Fuck the cops. His laughter is more strained, more high-pitched, a little empty. I weave these scenes for my own satisfaction, in hopes that I can understand him more.

I have to tell myself that he is more than black anger, that he is not entirely comprised of these little hints. I have to remind myself of his ways. The way his shoulders lean to the right, a habit gained from years of computer gaming. The faded white indents of a wallet in the pockets of his jeans, because he likes to carry nothing else. Any more would be a burden. The scars on his left cheek, because he pops his premature pimples knowing that there are better things to do in this world than waiting. The way he really laughs, hand slamming down against his thigh and brows furrowing, a throaty, deep boom so evasive and loud that it seems to be flooding out from every orifice of his body.

But then all he becomes is some happy clown, undamaged by a sordid past of some kind. He is a parent. He is a nasty cop. He is an abused cop. He is a warm, older brother. There are too many words to describe him. This is ugly, complex, and hard to look at; bright colors refusing to mix. I have to blind myself from his other colors or else it hurts my head to digest him. Erase out the gradient and the tone you have drawn him in. It paints a beautiful picture but it makes you think too much. Slash out the subtlety with black and white. It is easier to see him this way. _______ must be in monochrome, because he has too many colors. This is the heaviness of being. 

Ouch!

Please don't prod too much or I'll break down and cry and melt down the graters and it'll be the last of me you'll see again until I reconstitute and sit next to you on the bus again, but with more cracks this time.

Love you right

STICKING

WET
SLEPT
SOUR
SOUR
GRATE
MELT
PRESS
LIP
CROON
TEA
SWEPT
MUD
DUD
INCH
LIFT

Slow moving

Sometimes you need to neglect everything in life so as not to neglect yourself, right?

To begin cleaning my room takes considerable strength of the mind. I prepare for it throughout the week. I wake up to a messy room full of complete and utter shit, and repeat the morning mantra: tonight, when I get back home from work, I will clean my room. But I repeat that mantra as I head straight to a friend’s place holding a bottle of wine, and repeat that as I get drunk on aforementioned wine, and then repeat it again as I stumble into bed, too apathetic about my current condition, of the right treatment of the body, basic self-respect, matters of cleanliness, because I could really care less, and besides, I’m going to wash my sheets tomorrow.

But then I get a nagging feeling in my head, from when Kyle told me not brushing your teeth after drinking is the worst damage you could wreck on your dental health. I struggle my way to the bathroom— Bright lights! Cold floors! Moving!-- because I think I’m concerned about my teeth.

But I also know that I would actually just hate to look back at it all when I’m strapped to the operating chair in a few years. My dentist has just numbed my teeth with a large metal needle. It pinched. I’m sweating under the light when he grabs pliers and starts grabbing for a rotted tooth. “You seem nervous,” he says. “Relax.”

“Doctor, I’m fine,” I want to say, “I just sweat like this normally, for example, when I wake up.” He should know that abnormally excessive sweaters exist and that is fine. I flinch when the pliers lock on to my molar.

It’s at this time when I realize that my mouth is not yet completely numb and that after all these years I still don’t really know what my dentist looks like behind his mask.

Most of the things I find in my room are unused vitamins, paper clippings, business cards, posters, flyers, leaflets, individually wrapped bags of tea, deodorant I meant to return, two identical books I meant to return, an uneven Frisbee, heart-patterned wrapping paper, a dirty bowl with a stale chunk of rye bread, unreturned letters. I cannot throw them away, but I know the next time I come back to them I can grab them by fistfuls and leave them in the trash bag. Eventually I understand that I’ve grown weary of them, and that my bullshit has got to stop. Sometimes when I call my mom she'll ask for a picture of the current state of my room, which means she wants my bullshit to stop. No matter what, even if I am having a bad day, I have to stop my bullshit. There is no use dwelling on it. It stinks. 

I killed a plant once. My other plant has grown buds in my friend’s apartment, where it was forgotten about after winter break, and the plants that live in my room back home thrive because my mother waters them everyday while I am in college.

I used to get sharp pains in my foot. I waited three years before telling my doctor.

My favorite Italian ice shop closed down this summer. I have always meant to go there one last time.

I haven’t seen someone important to me in years. I don’t miss them but I love them very much.

But I let things grow old and dirty, because I reason that they’d end up like that regardless. I think I have done very well for myself despite this, but I notice myself more haggard, irritable, withered, brooding in the darker parts of my room where the light doesn't reach. I was told to lean in it. It's quieter there.

Weather

It was raining a lot in Chicago. I can’t really say for sure if this is a big surprise to me, if this strikes me as odd or upsetting, because it feels like I haven’t been here enough to have an opinion on it. Many nights this quarter I stayed up, running on packing anxiety and Ex Lib coffee and once a shot of Ballantine’s, waiting to fly away from Hyde Park in a stale-smelling plane. I had a lot of trouble deciding what jacket I wanted to bring on the plane, because I was conscious of the weather of my destination and the weather here; I wanted to be warm when I got off the plane in Chicago, but I didn’t want to overheat and explode in Miami. It felt very, very wrong, having to decide which jacket so many times.

Sometimes the airport feels a bit too far away from me so I chalk up an excuse to take an Uber. I like taking these Ubers, me in my blonde hair. I know I look young but I like to pretend I’m someone else when I take these Ubers. A creative consultant, a hip analyst. I usually stick to those roles. I know no one cares but I still persist in thinking that someone cares (I care!), so I lavish in playing pretend. In the safety of the back of the sleek car I gain a sense of self-worth and effortlessness that I don’t think I can attain outside of this space.

It was a raining a lot in Chicago, I mostly knew this because I watched my friends’ Snapchats of the rain beating down in Mansueto, or the puddles invading the quad. I watched it twisted up and tired in the cramped seat of the plane that just touched down in New York, I watched it when I couldn’t sleep at night because the bed in the boat just didn’t quite comfort me enough. How was Miami, people ask. It must have been so nice and warm.

It was nice and warm, look at my tan, my skin is soft from the rough saltwater.

I took a bus to Michigan. In a poem she wrote, my friend Michelle called our fellow passengers seaweed people. Their sleeping faces are hazy in my mind.

My favorite part of my trip to UMich was dropping off at the rest stop and seeing all the items for sale. Racetrack uniforms and half pound hot dogs. Butane burners. Michigan keychains, pineapple fruit cups. Iced coffee is on sale. For some reason, Mexican blankets. I wanted to buy a 99 cent pack of coconut donuts but I bought the fruit instead. I ate it with first a cheap plastic pick and then my hands and was still hungry. I felt very silly. I talked to the cashier enthralled by the fact she was from this small town in Michigan which is just all highways. I swiped through Tinder to see what the people were like. How metropolitan of me.

I was annoyed by the way the arm of the woman sitting next to me on the bus was just a little too close to mine. But then she looked at the two fruit cups in her hands and offered me one. I grew red, accepted the fruit cup, and got to know her. She was in Ann Arbor for a funeral and hoped to be a successful theater costume designer. She smelled like marshmallows, as all nice people do.

My other favorite part of Michigan was eating a burrito slathered in ranch and walking around the campus, imagining another life in which I went to UMich. So you could pass by these people, and never see them again on campus? I asked this with a high-pitched and dramatic screech in my voice. I chewed on chicken gristle, letting the thought churn.

Before I left, Jeff gave me his school t-shirts. It was warm in Ann Arbor when I left, so I wore one on the bus back to Chicago. The sun and the blue sky tricked me from the inside of the seaweed bus, the insulated windows had played me, it was cold when I stepped out.

I put on a jacket I stored in my bag. I had packed, estimated, predicted, envisioned, worried right.

and sometimes it just feels a little like

and then she grasped the keys in her pocket and closed the door behind her.

Photos taken by Yuri Suh, Yan Yan Chan

Screencap taken from The Wire

ahhhhh

In the final year of high school, we all smelled like milk. Teething on our pencil cases, our hair, nails, and wits frayed to the final point, shoulders deadened by the brutal beatings of too-heavy bookbags—this was it. For the very few and fortunate children of high-powered couples of finance, medicine, and law, and the offspring of the odd, sour-smelling, immigrant pair, this final year was our final stretch to college. To quote our counselors who enjoyed putting things in metaphors as much as possible, junior year was a marathon, and these beginning months were the final, short-lived race. To even consider running it, we needed willing knees propelled up to the maximum, shoelaces choked to submission, and above all, a fiercely vicious and bloody hunger for an acceptance letter, the physical proof of our future's security. No matter how quietly we went about it, pretending it was the last thing on our minds, the matter was time and soul-sucking. After all, everyone knew it concluded how the rest of your life would play out.

I decided that I would apply to the University of Chicago because it prided itself on making you think. And I also met a lawyer who had a tattoo of the school’s motto on the back of her neck, and I, oblivious in high school, thought it was a sure sign that the school and I were meant to be—cuz WOW she really loved it. This was the length of my research-- decided that one was enough and good so I did not bother to really think about the rest. Also, it was really far away from home, which was another plus in my book: it would give me the independence and individuality that I needed to grow. Just throw myself in the wild and I’ll figure it out, nibbling on acorns and tree bark that would feed and harden my character.

And, of course, with this horror story of a college application process  (neck tattoo lawyer, zero thought on what kind of professionals these schools churned out, zero consideration of what I might want to do as I grow older, the perks of writing only three essays for the entire college application process, being done in December) I was most definitely thrown in the wild. Stunned, stumbling around in the solemn Joseph Regenstein library in my X-Large wolf shirt, ratty sweatpants, long socks, and slides, thinking I looked cool, smelling like all-nighters and stale coffee, I did not know what I was doing in college or what I had set myself up for. Who knew that the UChicago Econ degree was well-respected and who knew that every time you lost your ID at a sweaty sad horny frat party you would have to pay $20 for a new one? Was the motto of the school really “Where fun goes to die”? Was that not a sarcastic little joke shared and humored amongst the students??? 

My first year of college was memorably monotonous—many nights spent on the first floor, poring over a sociology book in a hurry to comprehend the systematic workings of human societies, even though I failed to even understand why I liked to eat pasta on Tuesdays but never on Thursdays, and why I cried at nature documentaries. I cycled through repetitive talks and doubly helpful and horrifying conversations with upperclassmen and advisors about my major and my future and “what really matters”. It was full of worries about my personhood and my future, full of worries about what I liked and enjoyed, the unattractive, gross mystery of it all. I begged for it to be solved immediately.

I’m still worrying—worrying, but not trying to blow it up too much. Learning that, as zen and Gwyneth Paltrow as it sounds, closing my eyes and breathing in deeply, very deeply, with thought and consideration and patience, retrieves the many thoughts bouncing and zooming around my head right before I feel like I will implode and shatter into pieces that cannot be found and glued back. It doesn’t mean that I sit around doing nothing, waiting for the answers to come to me—in fact, I should be running around doing everything, searching and exploring to get closer and closer to those answers—but there is no need to imagine bleak and desolate futures, painting lovely images of my failures. These are soothing pictures of mediocrity, ones that are too easy to expect. Dreaming big is hard and difficult to reconcile but better than those pictures, but for me to dream big I’ve got to do big; slowly, slowly, with a certain level of too-bright hopefulness and an eager, undying resolve. 

Writing on here is the start of it all.