javius29

i spent a lot of time growing up pondering on what i would be when i grew up, what i wanted to be, what i didn’t want to be. something that didn’t make any of those lists was role model, yet here we are. pinned to the wall over my monitor, frozen in a moment, are the child-like faces of three people who i have had the liberty to watch grow into puberty. the first people who i had to catch myself from addressing “i remember when you were this big” and talk about them in the third person with words like “they grow up so fast”. they watch me more than i’d like and it’s only when they emulate me that i think i might not be the upstanding citizen i believe myself to be. i feel so incompetent when i can’t help them, as i watch them grow and realize and discover. ashley is only just now coming to grips with femininity and sexuality, and directly on her heels are her brothers. they don’t like each other, but they love each other, they fight and make up and scream and try not to cry. they’ve learned shame.

i would make this world perfect for them.

the want of this based solely off the notion that the knowing of everything, would it ever be achieved, would include absolutely the importance of why it is important not to know everything. why it is good to be flawed, good to not know. but then, if someone were to get that far what could possibly motivate them to give all that up. comparitively, when an individual be capable of giving up what they know for something that they do not simply because it might be better? unlikely, but then, why have a list of things that are easy to accomplish?

as far as i can tell the first stranger, a woman, grew up not knowing her father and coming to know her mother as more a sister or distant cousin than anything else. her grandparents raised her on a farm in alabama. she loved to write, to create for herself avenues of escape and intrigue. sometime along the way she decided to give that up to be closer to her loved ones, not knowing perhaps that what she had had was a gift. i wish she hadn’t.

the other, a man, grew up in chicago. he grew fast and strong, far quicker than his mind or his maturity. he did not know his father either and loved his mother about as much as a person ought to, and witnessed first hand what a boon independence was. he was not the smartest man, but the people at university sure thought he could play football.

they met in college, two people completely unlike anything the either had known, and the relationship grew faster than one would expect however much they did spend the statistically determined correct years courting. they had me; because of me, they both scraped to migrate out of the inner city, out of the north and into the suburbs. he loved it, she hated it, but then, he had never known a relationship where two people were working together, and nor had she. and neither of them had had fathers to pass on important instructions on how to raise a man.

i have some of it, but not all, the jagged jigs of this puzzle of the conception of my circumstance. i get all my information from yellow pictures and quiet, still black and whites tucked deep behind heavy things, in places prying eyes are not meant to go. i see them unhappy now and i wonder how much could have been avoided if they had just sat down and had an honest conversation with themselves, with each other, wtih me.

she was always the dreamer, and pushed her son to be happy because she had begun to understand cost.
he was always the realist, and pushed his son to be whatever he needed to be to survive, because he had always known how cold the world was.