Life in Capital Letters

week in review.

Anger
It’s 10am. Downstairs the neighbors are fighting. I can hear the man (always shirtless, showing off his red/brown tanned skin and featherweight-boxer build, which is a fine pairing for his lifeless eyes, small snake-slitted nose and thin lips covering teeth he doesn’t seem to care about as much as he cares about his muscles) yellingyelling and the sound of furniture being pushed around, but never crashing into anything.. inanimate. The woman’s voice never carries through the floor or all the way up the foyer steps, but in my mind’s eye I see her (skin the color and texture of an elephant who’s rolled in the mud, pale-colored eyes framed like antique paintings by the baroque crowsfeet and lines that may once have been caused by laughter, golden too-many-bad-perms-damaged hair flying behind her like a halo of meekness and failure) standing there, her mouth contorted by rage but her eyes filled with solemn acceptance. We accept the love we think we deserve. I hate her for accepting.
and I hate the man for making my fists clench in anger and I feel like a rubber band about to snap from too much pulling this way and that, and I want to torture him, give that man a painful knife-and-ink tattoo he deserves, post pictures of his ugly face all over town with a “wanted for wife beating” caption, so he gets a measure of the embarrassment he never feels for beating up on someone small and accepting. Maybe someone would even punch him in the dick.

Several Capital Lettered Words I Can’t Yet Discern
I’m not old enough, wise enough to be willing to do whatever it takes. For anyone, anything.
I’m not young enough to run away.

Service
There are tokens of love in the refrigerator and a diana ross tape you brought to me waiting to be listened to. I try to appreciate, to live outwardly, fully present in the moment. But a moment of weakness ambushes me as I think about what’s looming in my life: I feel as though I’m falling into a pit I’ll never be able to climb out of by making a commitment to give up myself for the improvement of future generations.
(Becoming a teacher in a high-need district is no joke. It’s blood, sweat and tears, or go home. And going home once you’ve started is not an option; you cannot fail these children or you’re worse than neglecting them, you’re giving up and giving in to the dismal future of impoverished, undereducated masses rising and falling in mutiny and suppression, their constant motion doing nothing but turning the ratwheels of the machine that keeps them enslaved. Yeah. It’s serious.) But am I ready? Am I able?
These questions are the ones I say out loud, but are a smokescreen for the real questions, Am I willing to give up days and nights and weekends in service? Am I ready for the possibility of failure? Of feeling stupid? Of not getting hired because I have no experience?
I dislike this hallmark of our generation, the soul wrenching feeling of trying to convince others that I’m competent when I’m not (yet); the resulting ache of why-wont-you-just-take-a-chance-on-me and why-do-I-have-to-lie makes me feel even more like running away from the altar. I feel like doing something selfish and rash, like going back to Russia and permanently overstaying my visa (I’m a refugee, I swear!) or going to art school. I want to stop wandering, stop wondering if every step I take is a step in the wrong direction, yet I’m terrified to settle. I guess I just want to be young and careless (read: stupid and irresponsible) again.
Then I read this and this, and feel a little better.

Love vs. The Self
Remembering the feeling of the soft skin of a forehead grazing against my inner thigh in misunderstood acquiescence makes me want to pound my fists into walls, floor, and flesh until they’re bruised and useless, and sink my teeth into flesh that will bleed so much into my mouth that I’ll choke on it. I want to drown.
To cure myself of this bout of the self-centered flu, I take a swig of the bitter medicine of imagining what it must have been like to be you trying to love me.