I want to suffocate him with my hate. Strangle his carefree neck with the twine of my restlessness. Feel the frenzy in my throat, the lock of his silence and disinterest caging by breath, trapping it right at the release! Exploding with the urge to converse, to convey, to connect, I must -
I must write,
and swallow words,
I must forgo all else.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Drove to the middle of nowhere (which was, unsurprisingly, only thirty minutes away from where I live, on the border of nowhere) today morning for my relative's medical procedure. While he was under, I visited a local waffle house (Thank technology for GPSs).
It's a tiny place, hardy a 'house' (more like a small barn); maybe 6 tables in total, with a bar stand across from the narrow kitchen; the whole place populated by villagers. I mean it. I mention it because the the 3 tables around my bar stool gawked at me as if I'd grown horns; I assume this is what dressing in business casual will get you here.
The waffles & bacon and chocolate milk for $6.90 themselves were good & filling and now weight heavily in my abdomen (not healthy, but what won't I do for an adventure of the mundane).
Back at the doctor's office, as I sat reading, a Russian speaker came out to the waiting area several times to call his wife with news of, I believe, his mother. Before I left for breakfast, the elderly woman was in almost too poor a condition to have the procedure. By the time I fed myself, they discovered she had cancer of the thick intestine.
The man's voice was nasal, whining - perhaps a southern accent. It made him sound annoying, and sleazy. It almost made him repulsive. But he sounded rushed as he repeated portions of the doctor's directions to the wife (Bella; this is how I figured out it's wasn't her mom, but his - she couldn't even focus enough to grasp the simple instructions the man was reiterating; I got them from the first time; and it's not like the reception was bad, either - I heard her a whole 3 meters away from his cellphone) - an appointment was already set up with a surgeon in Georgetown for Wednesday, and now they only needed to specify the time; his mother needed to get a computer topography of some sort at a near by laboratory (it was best to get it over with today, but she was tired already; it was barely 11am; no doubt the news was draining). The wife just kept not understanding.
He sounded so small and frustrated; he laughed at the office's lack of fax paper, how it was such an organizational mess - a silliness that didn't make sense, and could only be attributed to desperation.
When his mother, a short heavy woman of around 70 and a white curly bob, came out with a nurse and a walker the man sat her down, flew to her coat and back, place the checkered black and white wool over the shoulders, helped her navigate her arms through the sleeves, and knelt to button her up.
His mother has cancer. She was smiling the whole time.
Do I need to point out that I really like that man?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My moods are the shifting shades of color of a forest field on a windy day sprinkled with clear racing clouds.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Head architect of one of my department's large projects during a weekly seminar:
"You were always successful because you worked with back end. Why? Because nobody cares! It's the back end! As long as you work on the iceberg, no one will bother you. Work on the tip of the iceberg, and everyone will have an opinion whether to put the red button in the left of the right corner of the screen."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A purple woman with a purple pen (a fancy representative of some business department) sits regally in the auditorium chair. Her neck and fingers are dressed in tasteful gold. Her brown hair is dyed with artificial sunshine and the end result boasts the colors of an American desert. She is either bold or arrogant, for she responds to the speaker's points, but always wrong; her comments always reveal she does not understand the material (even I, who is an amateur in all this system development stuff, see that she misunderstands). She acts like a boss. The room assesses her out of the corner of their eyes with each ring of her voice. I wonder how much fragility, how many cracks and rotten support beams her position conceals in her self esteem.
My first instinct is to dislike her.
But if I let myself linger, if I shift my fear from my chest to the bottom of my spine, there is something. Something in the heels she's wearing, in the squint of her eyes while listening, the ready way she laughs that whispers of a free spirit on her good days (or in her past?). It promises that the apparent bitchiness of hers wasn't always there.
My instinct should give her a chance.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My work is full of Russian speakers (I don't say 'Russians' because they're from all over, and of many generations. 'Russians' is a tricky term). I can tell them (any land-fellow of mine can) by their faces, their posture, the haircuts, the clothes. Being one (or maybe this is more universal than I think), you can always tell a Russian by the expression of the eyes - the country and the culture, they leave an impact. The penetrating stare, shot briefly and barely noticed as their eyes move to snapshot and judge something else; the constant readiness to take life by the balls to protect their own throat; the gratefulness and mistrust at the easy of breathing they can achieve here...
So perhaps I'm speaking specifically about Russian speaking immigrants.
But I can tell even when walking behind them. The slightly hunched shoulders, the out-turned strut of the hips, the polished shoes - I can feel it radiating off them, that feeling of being from the same place; that feeling feels like home (no wonder I can't stop smiling). They move in a small group, kind of circling each other without ever turning. They're laughing. I can tell they feel united (is this something non-immigrants have more trouble feeling?); they don't even need to look at each other.
When I can't see their beards and the lines of their years etched into their foreheads, I can see them as teenagers, strolling down a high school hallway, kings of the world. Another step, and they'll take off running - youthful, unblemished still.
No comments:
Post a Comment