Abide in a contact zone, we all do, are. I can. I cannot. What I take
to be mine makes me. Lost objects packed. Grow alone, I grew
with family, and where did your family grow, your parents and their
parents? The way you eat a hot dog without mustard. The mostly happy
gravity of immediate kinship and its calamities: my children are not yet
a category of Spanish-speaker but will be. You’re from D.C.; you went
to one of those bilingual schools. America is just another place, and I
cannot despair, the dear pure nothing is pure bullshit. The modernist obsession
with alienation and othering. I mean I spent years and hours in Chinese class
and in China learning Mandarin but have never translated anything except
the news. The origins of my feelings are opaque to me, but fundamentally
unmysterious. Phaethon was fundamentally transparent. The splendid pedigrees
of seven generations of dubious documentation. Heaven is a cafe, anywhere.
The deafening sound of traffic is not an object lesson, but understanding
seventy percent of anything is. If othering is a form of extension
(Sarah Ahmed), that extends reach through incorporation, long standing
acquisitive feelings. Oh shit this is empire, again. I have been it’s
mediocre agent since I was a babe, tending towards the exotic but
unable to be something other. I cannot. I am not the sunburned American
in the Ecuadorian jungle, the habit of being at home, the habit of
high-impact camping. The new hybrid as the new idealized mix of the pure.
Jesus fucking Christ I am saying that I am white but my whiteness tends
towards I don’t know. Fat bureaucrats with crummy posts far from the capital.
Disenfranchised soldiers. My great great grandfather didn’t want to
work on the railroad and didn’t want to work on the farm but mostly worked
on the railroad and drank. When does appropriation become the new
capitalist hybrid? This is a question I cannot I cannot get over. Am I
an ally or am I a thief. I am both, the relief of being conflated with something
interesting the way confession never is. You know what I’d confess.