I stretch out my legs on the sand. I can see her almost approach me. She is wearing a white beach jacket and a straw hat with a veil over it. In sunglasses and standing proud, her breasts sprout. No one would ever have suspected the loss of one or the other. She is smiling, and her mouth says, ‘I am happy in the land of palm trees, coconuts, and certainly, I don’t have to search for any monkeys because I was never one.’
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I once saw a monkey jerking it. It was at the zoo, of course, where several blue-faced baboons swung over plaster tree trunks and romped across a funny little walkway modeled after a hanging bridge. As much as schools want zoo visits to be positive, educational experiences that transform the lives of young people forever, what has stuck with me in a lifetime's worth of field trips is deflated polar bears, hobbled cheetahs, and a monkey ignoring all the other monkeys to beat his meat.
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A sweetheart story is what I crave. The sweep-off-the-feet type that rides my heart into the
sunset with the faint letters rolling in the background. As innocent as prince charming, in
desperate search of their damsel in distress.
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The preheated oven warms the living room. The eighteen-year-old tape deck plays the Mughal-e-Azam soundtrack in the background. Caramel bubbles over the stovetop as I scramble through the pantry to find pecans for the pecan buns. This is a typical Saturday morning in my household.
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Once, I had lunch with a really great poet. He said to me that most people think of anxiety the wrong way. They think that it is a rain cloud of what if, what if, what if, a cage of doubt and indecision which holds its sufferers in constant purgatory. They think of anxiety as a door flung wide open, flooding the mind with cumbersome uncertainty. In reality, though, there is nothing uncertain about anxiety. In fact, it is the most extreme form of certainty that can exist in the brain. Anxiety doesn’t ask “What if terrible things happen?” but instead says, “Terrible things are going to happen. What are you going to do about it?”
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It’s going on thirty-six years, yet I still argue with the thing. While walking in the neighborhood, I sketch out plans for a new beginning that will free me from the past. Or, say, I think that I will not think about it, but end up not fully admitting to consciousness the trauma surrounding what seems to have snowballed into its own life-form. A mass of pain is located in my lumbar spine—I know the discs leak fluid, though the last MRI showed bulges but no actual herniation.
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