We all look alike.
Right?
Isn’t that what you said?
We all just have that look.
What is my look?
Big dark eyes that betray my every emotion before I can stop them.
Olive skin that changes color in the summer sun.
Wild curly tresses, a rich chocolate brown, soft, inviting you to touch.
The high cheek bones of my indigenous ancestors.
What is my look?
“What are you?” They ask.
Your worst nightmare.
An alien.
A mermaid that got her legs.
A wild thing.
“What do you mean?”
You know, your skin isn’t pale white and your eyes are dark brown instead of blue, you look ethnic somehow but I’m too dumb to ask in an inoffensive way.
But they say, “you know, like where are you from?”
Chicago.
The city, not the suburb.
A small working class neighborhood, that you need to be real Chicago to know exists.
I come from streets gritty enough to scare your suburban sensibilities.
A city as beautiful as it is corrupt.
Shining gem on the edge of a Great Lake.
A city as bloody as it is welcoming.
Full of food so good, gluttony doesn’t even seem a sin. It seems the only option.
A city of broad shoulders built on the backs of the immigrants that settled here.
That’s where I’m from.
But that’s not what you mean.
You want to know why my skin is this color, my eyes this shape.
You want to know why I’m different from you.
“I’m from here.”
It’s not enough. Your face is confused.
But it’s the only answer you’ll get.
Because it is not a question of what I am, but who.
And you can’t handle that.
You are fire.
You are light.
Born under the stars of the ram.
You are fire.
Flickering flames and steady heat chasing away the lingering winter.
Sly smile and eyes that laugh at a joke you’re not in on.
You are fire, beautiful and terrifying.
They’re scared to get too close. But they can’t help but stare.
They told me to take it.
Shhh…it’ll make it better.
Just two a day would make me normal again.
I drink them all.
Two will make it better, all will make it perfect.
I feel nothing now. Everything is clear. Nothing hurts.
Emotionless I lay back and wrap my legs around death.
“It’s okay if we play,” I tell him.
“I know now that nothing really matters.”
Just put your lips together and blow.
I didn’t know my grandmother.
But one afternoon I stood on the steps whistling for the dogs and the hair on my mother’s body stood up.
Whistling into the afternoon.
Whistling for the dogs.
Whistling just like my grandmother.
Whistling like a dead woman I’d never met.
“It’s just you.”
“Yeah it’s just me.”
“My mother used to whistle just like that.”
Every time I whistle for the dogs my mother’s blood runs cold.
The Secret Life of Pandas 