What Goes Up...

I'm sitting in my home office, trying to send my resume out and write some fiction and poetry. My hotmail account's been messing up and one of my old editors just called to say that a piece I sent her two days ago just got to her. The wind is coming in through the dusty blinds. Portishead is crooning and booming in the background. I'm looking out the window. The sky is so fucking beautiful.

Stong gusts shake the branches of the tall trees that line my neighborhood. A chorus of a hundred birds are serenading the setting sun. It's otherwise quiet outside. Inside the house. In my heart.

There are cars thumping down the street, cruising at 30 mph down a street where ne'er-do-well children are talking ebonics and playing basketball.

My family is downstairs, in the living room, watching television with the volume up so that my parents can catch all the words.

The crackhead down the street is jeering at our autistic neighbor at the top of his lungs.

But it's quiet. In my head. In my heart. In the marrow of my bones. There's a chill. And it's quiet. Really quiet.

*****

I'm getting closer. I feel it. Closer to that feeling that I've been simultaneously dreading and working towards. That feeling of hitting The End. Not death, but that place where there is no place to go but up, out, forward -or down, into an abyss of mediocrity. That destination that makes people surrender to a Good Enough Life because the stakes have gotten too high and God forbid you fuck up the big chance to do something Great with your life. I'm headed there. I can feel it in my bones. The test. It's coming.

I'm mulling over all the choices I can make, all the futures I can have, all the people I can be.

I'm thinking about school: Going back. Succeeding in the conventional world. Being a "respectable adult."

I'm thinking about the work I do with kids: How much I love it. How little I need monetarily when I feel like every day is spent doing a good deed. How it makes me feel level, even - like none of the horrible stuff I've done matters because I go into the classroom and I listen to the kids and we run around the track and write short stories and have grammar lessons and I tell them that they're special and that they'll make it no matter where they come from or what people may say to the contrary. It' like being baptized in the breath of babies every day; I'm cleansed and new again.

I'm thinking about love. Love and dating and sex...

Drummer Boy and I had mind-blowing sex the other night, even though my initial reaction to him was sadness. How could I hang out with him knowing where it would lead, when Caleb warned me that Drummer Boy always went after his conquests?

There was solace in Drummer Boy's familiarity with that part of my life. There was hope in knowing that he was the only living vestige of that version of me, Rocker Maria. I knew that he would see her through all the layers; that he'd pick out that particular inflection in my voice, that particular twinkle in my eyes; that he'd see me and he'd see the same Maria that dated Caleb... and I needed that. I needed to be her.

I forget sometimes what it was like to be those Marias, and when I'm scared, when I'm lost, when I'm facing the eye of a storm, it's good to melt back into the skin of someone I used to be and just... Be that person. For a while...

So many times, I catch myself winging it, and I shudder.

Contrary to popular belief, I really don't know what the hell I'm doing. I just act and react and build my life bit by bit and people see in me what they see, and there's no magic or special quality to me. I'm just another person.

*****

So I'm in my home office, staring at a dark sky, thinking about love, about life, about Caleb. About Travis. About Rob. About Jorge. About Tarenz. About them, the great loves of my life, and all the guys and gals in between the great loves of my life.

I'm thinking about the struggle for a female Filipino-American-New Yorker to find her place in politics, in society, in her culture(s), in her sexuality, in her generation, in her potential. How hard it is to overcome the daily nuisances that life throws at you, the moments of wonder, the ugly and awful memories which haunt our nightmares.

I'm thinking about the opportunities I've had, taken, missed. I'm thinking about the revving up, the readying, the practicing for Real Life to begin. And I know that I'm scared. I'm really scared. I'm typing this, and I know deep down that this is when the excess of all I've ever been will be buried.

I'm feeling my mind ease as fear screams blisteringly inside of me. I'm grasping for my friends, my family, my lovers, to remind me of who I've been, who I've been wanting to become. I'm shouting at myself, pumping up my adrenaline, quickening my pulse. I know what I need to do. I just have to do it.

I'm all too willing to go out on a limb no matter how far down the possible fall.

Forgive me if I fail.