Choices

Up against the wall, face against the cement, hands behind my back.

Choices.

I see what is happening. I see where it's happening. I see why it's happening. I see who is doing it. I see who it's being done to.

Choices.

I made a choice 12 years ago when I left the country that never wanted me, my name, my skin, my sexuality. She was a cruel mother with her church so cold it was like a meat locker, and the home was even colder, but she was my mother nonetheless.

Choices.

You love a cruel mother. You do. Fucking biology. If you didn't, you would have dropped her like a hot rock. Maybe you did. What did it cost you? It cost you. It did. It absolutely did, but I understand why you've cobbled together a frame of thought that allows you to think otherwise.

Choices.

I see what's happening and it becomes more and more difficult to not say things that pick a side. Picking a side will mean the end of some friendships. I already told a cousin to go fuck herself when she tried to read me. She thought I'd forgotten about the trigueña daughter she abandoned in favor of her son, el jincho.

Choices.

I don't live there anymore. Haven't in so very long. But she's still my mother. I still check in on her. I make sure she's got food and electricity. If the lawn's a mess, I stick around for a day or two to tidy it up. I do it and she let's me and I'm a fool for having done it because there is no thank-you. Never. But I know that, so I'm the stupid one. I acknowledge that fact.

This isn't my actual mother or an actual lawn. Let go of the literalism.

Choices.

I'm the milkman's son. Maybe not even his. Maybe not even that. They want me when they want me and don't when they don't. That may seem like a redundantly obvious statement, but the part you're not getting is that it's not my choice. Never my choice. Ever. When I'm there, I am ever the direct object to be addressed, never the subject deploying the verb.

Choices.

Where I live now, I am no one in the best way possible. I am unseen because all faces are my face. I am unheard because my voice and words are the same as everyone else. No one knows me because no one's looking to deal with me, to handle me, to decide my fate, to contemplate where I do or don't fit into the weft and warp. Those cold, bony hands on the shuttlecock are death's hands. They do not rush with blood; they are not soft with flesh. They are hard and chalky and dry. They have Anne Coulter's withering face. They speak in the screech of Tomi Lahren. My eyes water from the fumes of the 100 volume peroxide she places directly to her scalp despite the very clear warning that it's for wigs only. Look what happens. Fried neocortex.

Choices.

When I was younger I didn't realize the issue with how I was exoticised. I didn't understand the price for all those eyes and lustfull glances. The assumptions made about me were true to an extent, so it only seemed like facts, not dehumanization. I am more than what's in my pants. I am a man, not big uncut Caribbean cock over which to drool and make lewd comments.

Choices.

My mother is running down the street, naked, with an unshaven vulva and her pendulous breasts swinging in ways that look painful.

Do I chase her? Do I save her? Or do I just let this be the price for all the cruelty, all the times she refused to say my name correctly, all the times she told me to stand up even though I already was because she just wanted to take a dig at how short I am, all the times I was berated for speaking in that other language as though it were a flaw, an aberration, instead of a skill.

She's nearly reached the stop sign at the end of the street and there's traffic at the intersection.

I think I'll just let her run on through.