10.28.22

We can talk about this quietly as if we are the only people in the room. I started noticing the way people speak about their children. It became clear to me that a child is an entrance to somewhere deeper. He tells us about his brother loves his freedom too much for children. The brother wants to go on extended vacations with his girlfriend and such. So someone offers: children are portable. People laugh. Another person: tell him that he'll love that child more than vacations. Her child likes to bake cakes that do not look like cakes. She shows us a photograph of a cake in the shape of a taco topped with lettuce that they carved from sugar and dyed green. It was startingly convincing. None of us believe it when she reveals to us what it really was. What does it mean to make something that looks so much like something else? Are we surprised or disappointed when it's not what we thought it would be? 

They don't know what to do when their child barges into their room and clambers on top of them. They don't know where to draw the line yet. Sometimes the children need holding and they forget to say please. A small body and a large one. This image brings up a small ache I had forgotten. My face was growing warm from the wine so I took a moment and sat outside. I say this to the person sitting next to me: I didn't grow up like that and he replied, me neither. The next morning I see him walking back from the pier and I called out to him but he didn't hear me. He must have been on the phone with his kid, from the smile on his face. It was 8 in the morning and the city was just on the verge of waking up. A man came up to me and asked me for change and there was ten dollars in my pocket so I lied to him about it. He looked me in the eyes and blessed me. Along the pier, so many people slept with their dogs next to them. Someone pulled a shopping cart down the promenade, their small dog standing alert at its hull. I wondered how this might all be different, as I always do. I thought about why my parents brought me to this country and how they would tell me to mind my own business. I think I am standing on the cusp of something and I'm not sure what it is. I wonder if this is where children come from. On the plane I was reading about famine in our country and counted the years my mother must have spent hungry. Why I lied about the ten dollars in my pocket. How my parents never held me and this world as the reason.