A random train of thought
She was so scared of planes and I tried to be compassionate or even just plain patient, I tried to understand and calm her down when we’d “be experiencing some turbulence” but honestly, I’ve been taking planes since I was two months old and I’m still standing, right? She said she’d prefer to take a cruise ship across the ocean than spend eight hours in a little metal box hanging in mid-air. I thought about it for a little bit then thought no – if I were to choose the lesser of both evils, the airplane would be my pick. I mean, at least when you crash, or know you’re going down, you know it won’t take too long. In a ship, you go down and get pulled down and the water’s probably freezing cold and then you’re drowning. Can you imagine what drowning feels like? I’m a swimmer – or was a swimmer – but we won’t talk about it – so yeah, I’m a swimmer and even with years of training your body to stay underwater, I don’t think that in a panic situation I would do so well. I do a lot better when there’s a rush and they need you to swim butterfly… Oh! Butterfly! My friend Gen nicknamed me that when I swam fly for the team – I was good. I was good because I flew from a team in the US to a team in Senegal. And you just know that training in the US is going to put you at the top of the heap when you get to Senegal. It was always fun to race in front of that one boy too cause I knew every time that I would impress him. He changed as time went on – wasn’t the same face, but was always different shades of brown. That’s not because I “like chocolate men.” It’s because there was maybe one white guy for every ten black guys – no, even less than that I think. And honestly, they’re just people. Why would I date the bastard who wore his pants too low, smoked up too much, and flunked out of school? I admit to having dated at least one of those at different times – but I would never be able to deal with all three in one go. These boys were never from the same place either. There was a Korean- American, African-American, Bissau-Guinean, French-Ivorian, Ivorian, Italian-Cape-Verdian, Dutch-Senegalese – it all just proves my friend’s point – I’m not gonna be a soccer mom, I’m gonna be an international football mom. I flew back to the US for school and ended up dating two guys who were very much not American. There was a Latino and a Turk. Reminds me of my aunt telling me to marry someone who will allow me to keep blond hair and blue eyes in the family. My mom’s response to that was that she wanted brown babies running around so that she could piss them all off. Pissing them off seemed to be my forté. My family never understood why I wasn’t like them, and my grandmother never misses an opportunity to talk about how my dad took me and my brothers away from her. I mean, why would someone want to go help people in Africa when they could just stay near home and be content with their own (crazy) family? I wonder if that’s what caused me to have some kind of distain for the US, my family… that would be a shame, but honestly, I know that there are a lot of other factors that if I elaborate upon them, it always ends up with me just saying that I like socialism and the French language and all of their problems more than how the US deals with their own. I guess I’m not alone with those feelings, but it’s never really been my home… and so so many people assume that it should be. I think that I’m just gonna end up on a plane in any direction other than the US for the rest of my life. Good thing I’m not scared of them too.
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