i n

F

BIGGER

SMALLER

COURIER

GEORGIA

TIMES

VERDANA

COMIC

l

RECENT

POPULAR

e

u

 ^{(it's beta!)}

Mike: “ I know, I work with electricity! That’s what I do! Why would anyone want to do that? I mean, low voltage shocks can be fun, but do that for too long and your motor skills start to tap out…”

Person who lives in the room to the left of my couch: “Really?”

Mike: “Yeah, the longer you hold on the less able you are to take your hand off it.”

“Wow.”

Displacement. Amanda's apartment reminds me of Jamaica Kincaid’s introduction to Best American Travel Writing 2005 for two reasons. One, because it’s an introduction to a book that is filled with traveling writing that's different from what you would expect, and two, because it's about finding new forms of displacement. Maybe even savoring them. I know I was pretending to blame how insecure I felt on the fact that she hadn’t told me she had roommates, (see above) specifically that one of them was transgender. But trying to blame my displacement on Amanda's roomates only worked for so long.

That weekend was the first time I have ever been on my own in a city. It was lonely in a way I didn’t expect it to be. Oddly, I felt trapped. Amanda emailed me instructions of how to get to her apartment from O'Hare and said she would be back at midnight. It wasn't the first time I'd traveled alone, but it was the first time no one was on the other end. When I took the train to Exeter to visit Ken earlier this year, he picked me up at the station and spent the weekend making me macaroni and cheese in the dorm kitchen and showing me around. There were some points where I felt a little smothered, especially when he insisted that I sleep in his bed, but thinking back, I'm grateful. I'm seventeen years old, and no matter how much time I spend traveling, or how often I've had to look after myself, maybe I don't want to. I'll thank Ken for taking care of me for the weekend someday. Not now. I'm still the tough little highschooler who got stuck living in his apartment after camp at Kenyon was over, because there was no one to pick me up. Telling him that I was glad he took care of me would admit weakness, an inequality in our relationship, both of which are things I'm not ready to say to him yet.

The note Amanda left under the door said that the green couch was mine to live on for the weekend. I slide my stuff in and around it nicely, and Mike pops his head in the living room to tell me he's going out, but will be back in about an hour. I looked around his room when he left. It was my only triumphant moment of the day. My queer-dar finally worked! Ha! I knew felt something different (familiar?) about Mike—and voila! A bottle of T was on his dresser! I was looking at my future, and it was in a tiny little Rx bottle. Still, not unimpressive, given its power. Roar!

The farthest I venture that night is the CVS down the block to buy macaroni and cheese for dinner. Mike gets back, and I huddle on the couch and watch The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Mike sits at the table with his laptop. I don't say anything to him, and he doesn't say anything either. But I'm okay with that. For all I know, Amanda never told him that I was transgendered either. Besides, who says that just because we both are transgendered we should engage in meaningful conversation? Why force it?

Before I finally fall asleep, late after Amanda comes home, I decided that being alone in a city could also be curiously liberating. You would just have to get comfortable first. Unfortunately, It's Saturday night, and I'm only there until Monday. But the liberation does kick in the next day, as I self-tour Northwestern University and a friend of mine who lives in Skokie picks me up in his "ghetto car" and takes me to the beach. The day is hot, bright, light, and high. I exhaust myself working on my forehand Frisbee throw and attempting to soak Dev with the entirety of Lake Michigan. The green couch is no longer a barely moored haven, just a couch.

My brother’s hands are thin. He tells me this, concerned. I reassure him that when he’s older and gains some weight his hands won’t be so thin, but I’m probably lying. With all the medication he takes he may always be skeleton-thin, no matter how many bowls of chocolate cookie dough ice cream he eats. This is a new thing, my brother telling me what he worries about. We never used to talk much before I moved to London. I wonder what’s changed. It’s not that he’s easier to understand, because he’s not. His sentences have no syntax—too many pauses and no ends. What’s worse is that he writes just how he speaks. I have to spend hours going over his summer homework, editing out the extra words and trying to help him realize where the periods should go. When I finish and he reads his work over again he tells me sheepishly that I should be a professor. I am ashamed, because I’ve left a few errors in his work, just to make sure we’re not cheating. I say, with a little annoyance, “I’m not going to be a professor. I just write well—it’s not that hard.” He sighs, finally looking like the fifteen-year-old as he’s supposed to be, not like a gangly eight-year-old. “You’re right, it’s not that hard. I’m just not as smart as you.” This is new, his telling me that he can see the gaps between us.

“Kevin...Yes, you are.” Am I lying now?

I’ve always hung around with smart people. I love the thrill of intellectual conversation, testing boundaries, pushing towards a conclusion that is new, and mine. Writing English essays is my guilty pleasure. But what does it mean that I am a smart person? What is it worth?

I am not going to wax loquacious about how the simple gestures of my brother are often more meaningful than mine. They are, but I have never been convinced learning that is as beautiful as claimed. The little niggling voice inside of is glad that it is us who is learning this, us who can appreciate this beauty. Thank god is us who is learning this. The only time I’ve ever heard someone express true regret at the tidy lesson learning ability of smart people has been with my guidance councillor. She patiently listene to me as I analyse myself: how lonely I’ve been since I moved, how I know exactly how to help myself, but just can’t do it. After I was done agonizing she told me, “You know what I wish, for kids like you? I wish you could go through life without knowing what’s ahead. Sometimes, I think it’s worse that you aren’t able to just go through it.” My guidance councillor has probably seen a lot of kids like me. Intellectually, I know that, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling like the first one. I ask her, “Knowing things isn’t going to help me, is it? It’s not going to make anything easier.” Before I leave, she tells me to focus on taking little steps. She says nothing about the value of knowledge, and I’m not going to ask again for an answer. Perhaps the gift and curse of knowing how to write is that I can put into words what I don’t quite understand, and it sounds beautiful.

My former best friend Krupa is one of the most brilliant people I know. The title “former” is new. We sat down at Starbucks a few weekends ago (This is how it ends? At Starbucks?) to discuss why can we no longer seem to read each other’s minds. After this conversation, we will go our separate ways, pleasantly. Things have changed, we’ve grown apart. But suddenly I can’t speak. Krupa’s staring at me. I am being emotional about something she has already decided is over, already understands as over. I look back and see, in my mind, like a map, all the mistakes I made to get to this place. And when I turn over each one of them in my mind I don’t know that I could have saved myself from any of them. It's over, sure. But I wonder when it will really kick in. What will be the seemingly innocuous event that drives it home? Or will my realization be a gradual loss I can only look back upon from a not-so-distant future? Have I losit it all already? When will I understand?

In typical smart person fashion, I have been trying to explore the gaps between knowledge and, for lack of a better word, understanding. Is practice the only thing that differentiates having knowledge and being able to use it? I have had plenty of practice in both being lonely, in having and losing friends, but that doesn’t help enough. Practice is not the only thing that separates knowledge from understanding; or all older people would be wise. Wisdom. Perhaps that is the elusive, slippery quality that I am looking for. How do you obtain wisdom? The ancient Greeks are not all that helpful. Socrates, Aristotle, Plato: is wisdom is knowing what you know, knowing what you know you don’t know, or the judicious application of knowledge and action? They attempt to define, and I suppose in doing so, they believed they were on the path to such. I hardly think there’s a path to wisdom, at least, not one that you can find on purpose. The definitions vary so much that it would be hard to know who had gotten there anyway. For me, I think Aristotle is the most helpful ancient on the subject. Not the most helpful in terms of teaching how to obtain wisdom, but most helpful in his affirmation of different types of wisdom; that “true wisdom” whatever that may be, is an alchemy of a many ways of knowing, perhaps so many ways that I may never hit upon all of them. Right now, it seems I must be content with the attempt, with uncertainty. And for a smart person looking for answers, that's something new.

Bored already. Shocking, really. Tired, still. Repetition, coffee. The rain, The damp-marbled blue jeans, The burping yellow butterflies falling in my mind. I have a dream of palm-tapped windows, Water sluicing down to grace— really— grass. The coffee flies in my mind, And now John F. Kennedy is dead, again but history class is gone, Shoes smacking the pavement.

1: “It’s starting again.”

2: “What does he think he’s going to talk about?”

1: “I don’t know, maybe he just wants someone to talk to?”

2: “How pathetic. You would think he could at least pretend to write fiction.”

1: “Fiction. Like anyone ever really writes fiction. Even the most far-flung of universes root in the

author’s own.”

2: “Own universe?”

1: “No, nothing that broad. The author’s own universe is his family, his childhood, his teacups, his own

unimagined future.”

2: “His own unimagined future. How poetic. If the faggot has a future, it’s going to be dark--no offence.

I think he was meant to be lonely.”

1: “Stop using faggot. He’s not—“

2: “Like it matters. You know they don’t make distinctions when push comes to shove—literally.”

1: “He doesn’t like it.”

2: “Yes he does. Ever since buying that Eric Himan album. Obviously he subconsciously wants to use it—

to stop being afraid of it. He smiles every time that song plays.”

1 (hums/sings): “Are you afraid I’d be the hero that you are looking for?

And you’d have to thank my faggot ass

for winning you your fucking war”

2: “Notice he never plays that song out loud.”

1: “No. But he listens to it when it runs through his head like we do."