The pulse of sugar or starch, varying, rises in response to stimuli from my cerebral cortex — my learned cravings and desires. In the midst of great energy and reverie, especially of an intellectual pursuit — down the barrel of the gun the eye travels, hoping to find its own reflection.
Pasadena is so similar to the necked roads of Beltway counties because the city is peppered with small businesses; different because they are of white people’s habits and ticks. Bar after small bar adjacent to gas stations and the straight lines of suburban regimentation. In Silver Spring, Ethiopian restaurants and 7-11’s, eyeglass huts and street Black Israelites bemoaning women wearing jogging pants. I don’t see anyone walking around in Pasadena. I’m driving through Severna Park on a dusky Wednesday night to pick up my Community Supported Agriculture box from a weed-growers shop. They don’t sell any real bud on the premisis. Trucks grow exasperated at newcomers finding their way along Baltimore-Annapolis Road, and they hum with violence past smaller cars to prove their larger existence. I grew up understanding something about flying a display-size flag from a wooden pole on the back of a pick-up truck! I’m from the Shore. I grew up understanding the slipping feeling of drink in majestic inner cavities, floating from the house party down to the McDonalds. And I’m still chasing everything.
Maybe that’s why I still eat Starch and don’t swallow it, holding the ball of it in my mouth while the flavor slowly rolls in. Pressing it between my tongue and upper palette until the roof of my mouth takes like chalk if it’s Target cornstarch, sweet and loose dust if it’s Argo, the bulk of the grain of a potato if it’s potato. Maryland as an assemblage of concrete sensations creating a fantasy that can only be briefly experienced, then fraudulently aestheticized into a conversational non-existence no one else recognizes. How can I make you know this place the way I know it? Only I have this distinct pain. When I talk to other women who are from where I’m from, they’re inevitably white and I always feel Outside. They know Inside. But we both grew up in the same place, doing the same things. Kyle would always come to parties with his Obama mask in the trunk, a flesh-resembling plastic hood with a lifelike resemblance to the past president. I guess the point of the mask was to poke fun but it always seemed a kind of reverence to me, but fraught. Kristin’s brother surprised to find me rehearsing our dance project in her basement the first time I visited her house. The silence of the beach while my friends frenched on it. Only I know how 50 curves into the Beltway and only I know how it feels to cherish the Beltway because I’m from a remote island bereft of the kind of foreign Negress archetype I originate from. I digress. To physically sense the beauty of the female writer on the page is the sensation from which many of us are writing from, I do not know if I’m bold enough to claim that place as my center. If you wait long enough — can you wait long enough — to create these neural pathways, please. The limbic system controls the body’s physical responses to emotions and the cerebral cortex creates meaning; activates the limbic system regarding the positivity or negativity of an apparent stimulus. The Stoics believed that there was no universal reality, all each of us have are our distinct reactions to the gaseous phenomena arising around us like oxygenated free radicals. The esoterica of my teenage years was the horniness of a male poet’s tumblr post, and I still believe in lust that one has to dig and crawl into to make.
The sexy redhead letting me into the dispensary late at night after I retrieve my final belongings (the old router, my good bike with the satchel) from my last apartment — asking me where I’m from, where I’m going? I’m currently living a revolution in a book, trying to tie these loose ends up to become the kind of woman everybody seems to want me to be. When I fight with my Mom, I tell her I have a hard time marrying my narrative of who I know myself to be with the disfigured automaton of how she sees me. I want to know the narrative of who I know myself to be, though. It isn’t the E-girls who have decided that hope is retarded making up my Twitter feed, and I’m becoming even bereft of that. No longer cool, much more sexy, on the edge of the known universe, trying to stop putting a teaspoon of Starch on my tongue to settle me before rubbing it on my gums coke-style and finishing with grand spit of it all out into the sink. No calories. Much change. Brief levity, redundancy, the smell of the good earth beneath me, the reminder of plantations preceding home-ownership, and what comes before that knows nothing of how I got here — meaning very little to me.
