2004.

It was that year that time flew into a 6/8 double jig, ditching the slow waltz of our heart-beat metronome and dragging us limply through this blank, nameless decade.

And who was supposed to prepare us for this? Suddenly, even our fingernails grew at rates we couldn't reconcile with any common biology. The rent was due hour after hour, and the 40 grand and 50,000 pages of our education were swallowed and vanished, in moments too short to be called moments, into the swamp of our gray matter. And who was the universe to demand these things of us? Who, watching us erase whole days in queasy sleep and ignored dreams, would ever think us prepared for it? Who would ever say that by nineteen we were ready to abandon those things that stay lodged at the back of the throat, unchanged and present and entirely immune? Yes, I know there was no holy mandate, but the suggestion is there and its an honest question. Who really thought we could ever leave those reeds and what we found among them, and who affixed the thousand subsequent frames that became this year to the end of the tape, and who thought it would just play on, seamless and consecutive, in rageless silence?

Reasons I May or May Not Accidentally Be a Racist (Part Two)

2. Fatima.

Pretty much as soon as I pop out of the womb, my mom hires a babysitter. Because I don't remember the womb part, I harbor the secret infant belief that my mother is a slightly emaciated black woman from East Cleveland, and this pale woman who lets me suck milk out of her once in a while is just doing me a favor. Her name is Fatima, and I will remember literally nothing about her except my scalp burning the time she tried to give me cornrows before I had any real ostensible hair, and how goddamn much I scream when she leaves for her night classes at CSU. By the time I get old enough to talk she's not around anymore, but when my sister goes through her Naughty by Nature phase, I can call up half the words to O.P.P. as if from a past life. When I play barbies, Skipper always rides in the trunk of the Malibu Dream Car, and a small legion of Christies take shotgun, their pointed toes signaling north out of the convertible windows.

Reasons I May or May Not Accidentally Be a Racist (Part One)

1. Miriam.

She is my roommate for the three months I live in Spain, and in that time, she manages to fuck more people than I have ever fucked in my entire life. This really is her only dominant characteristic: she has animal tattoos in disturbingly suggestive places, and for Christmas, she gives me a necklace in the shape of the stripper silhouette that truck drivers like to put on their mud flaps. One time, she tells me a story about a guy she met on the beach behind CatWalk: she wasn't sure if she was homeless, but she wanted to fuck him, and, tragedy of all tragedies, she didn't have a condom. Only she doesn't believe me that English word for "condom" is "condom," so she illustrates the concept with an elaborate hand gesture that looks roughly like she's stabbing herself in the vagina with a 2x4--seriously, that wide and perfectly angular.

For the rest of my life, I will be convinced that all Germans are sluts, and that they are all having the weirdest, most impossible sex with their horrible square Lego-people genitalia,
and none of them close the bedroom door when they do it, and their roommates have to hear them screaming their awkward, hairball consants in every inch of their tiny Spanish apartment, all the time.

Tongue.

It wasn't so much that he wouldn't eat it--this beautiful dinner, everything braised and skewered and punctuated with unnecessary herbs, the kind of dinner you feel guilty just being in the same room with, much less stabbing open with Bill's filigree-handled cutlery. (And really, who filigrees cutlery?) It was that he watched them eat it. (If filigreed cutlery didn't make you nervous before, you were gravely deluded). It was that he placed himself in a crushed velvet arm chair in the corner of the room, and wove his fingers into a tight knot, and grinned at them, for the whole two hours, demanding their critique.

"Do you think it was, like, a sex thing?" Joe asked her in the car.

And of course she said that it was, and they speculated about the contents of that guest bedroom he wouldn't let Joe's aunt stay in when the Marriott ran out of room for the wedding guests. And he thought how good they were together, how they were the kind of couple who waiters smirked at because their conversations were the kind you'd like to eavesdrop on. He even leaned across the center console and stuck his tongue into her ear, in a gesture of thanks.

All the while she knows: if he'd been able to probe further, past the shell of her skull, to taste the thought that was blooming just then, an inch deeper in her brain, he would understand Bill. That night, her dreams would be all taste: a spike of sangiovese as sudden and red as a wound, the absent pearl at the base of an oyster's small corpse.

John, Paul, Dick, Jane.

They were going to just do it–city hall on a Tuesday morning, quick, shotgun wedding style, only without the sheriff or those terrible hats–but then they started talking about what they'd actually name the thing. His only ideas were things like Huckleberry and Valentine, and for a terrifying flash of a moment, she realized that everything would be this way. He would paint their house neon just to be that house. He would buy a classic car, and every time a cupholder broke or the fender got bent they would have to send seven grand to some special guy in Idaho who only did business on Ebay. He would be the kind of parent whose kids would rather he had been their uncle, the kind of parent who had kids just to give them names– like buying a tank of hermit crabs.

And really, she was like that too. And as much she wanted to dress it up in bowties and hilariously tiny suits, she couldn't help but think that nothing, not even the best two dates she'd ever had, nothing could justify forcing another human being to go through life with a mother like her and a name like Mercutio.

They would wait a week. She would talk him down to Naomi, maybe a nice Solomon or Lane.

Bounty.

Every goddamned christmas, my mother goes to Costco, buys a month worth of groceries, and wraps them up and puts them under the tree. When you're eight, it's kinda funny. When you're fifteen, you don't want to tear into a box expecting an laptop and find an entire frozen turkey, leaking juice out of its frozen turkey ass.

I know its supposed to be significant because my mom gets all misty, and I fake it, and hug her, and tell her that I love my 50 oz jar of raspberry preserves, really. But she's been doing it for so long, ever since the year that Dad got laid off and they had to pawn off all the kitchen appliances to pay my brother's tuition. Yes: I remember sitting in that yawning space where the oven used to be, playing with those dead wires coursing out of the wall, limp and yellow, and that was kind of sad, I guess. But I was six, and I was into the Brave Little Toaster. I thought coffee machines had significant inner feelings.

Now, I don't anymore. Now, Dad works for Google. Now, I don't want a brick of Guyere in a bag shaped like Santa Claus' face, and I don't want Mom to make us eat it all on the living room carpet like we're hobos who've never seen an industrial-sized tank of cheese puffs in their entire lives, and I don't want her to videotape it, sobbing.