Thought Catalog

Living in Crown Heights would be akin to re-entering the closet, five years after having emerged from it. “Could you do that?” my mother asked me.

Today, I considered becoming a troll.

It is hard to pick out scenes for this story. How to discern what’s important. How do you compartmentalize the brittle histories between two people?

You said you didn’t like Woody Allen, he made Manhattan look too easy, so we saw the film with Dolly Parton instead. You thought the tree at Rockerfeller had too many lights.

And now, with a new name and the false, clean sense of erased history, he takes a train and joins his cousin in Georgia, where an untangled root of his family strain found soil before. He finds himself in Savannah (or possibly Marietta, or Bainbridge, where he will one day be forgotten in the amalgam of the family burial plot, a plot he will buy himself) and begins his tenure at his cousin’s Laundromat.

The kiss was not well-executed. Our foreheads were interlocked, attempting to preclude the act. She was rubbing my temples, my shoulders, relaxing the malaise out of my muscles, working to my bone marrow. Why did I let her touch me, was I aroused by illogic? No. I wanted to be transcendent, cerebral. I wanted to be a poem.

Two days after my mother had cradled a small piece of happiness in her hand, her body performed its most treacherous act and unraveled that knotted ball of chromosomes. Mitosis taught her an important lesson: to become whole, you must at first be broken.