boston part c

you are looking at me, wide-eyed, from the other side of the glass window, with a half-smile, a crinkled forehead and a curiously bent nose. you are wearing a blue flannel shirt, brown leather shoes, a Red Sox vinyl jacket, and carrying a white plastic bag. looks like a carton of milk and a box of Cheerios, but I could be mistaken. you appear like a shadow, perhaps. a silhouette against the flash of bright yellow lights in the township of Arlington where I am. right now. drinking a decaffeinated beverage, tapping away on my mobile phone and listening to Rob Dougan's instrumental compositions. i have had a fulfilling day; exciting, reflective and responsive. extensive walking, singing aloud and dodging two drunk boys throwing bottles at each other on Varnum Street. you are possibly waving at me right now, trying to speak with your eyes. but i am semi-alert, looking through your body, remembering the weight of my Boston pedagogy. mired in a nostalgia; i cannot explain. the kind where you felt electrified, revolutionized and transformed in the folds of your naivete, and grew, and matured, and ripened in a city that you loved, in a city where you built your dreams, in a city where you saw yourself.

i am in a red city shirt; i've worn it all day in the midst of a baseball parade, a feminist intellectuals convention, a hospital and a library. a disgruntled father cut across a coffee line earlier this afternoon, to buy some for a dying daughter. i flinched, violently. she is microcephalic, tender and perishing. i spent minutes imagining what she looks like; tying a father's face into a feminizing, fetishizing morph. but i didn't have an answer. into the demise of a clouded imagination. onward and into a canopy of fairy tales. a dead daughter, blood gushing, trembling in a dialogue of evolutionary ingenuity. the last impression of a breathing, human epitope of violent laughter. i shook my arms; as if hyper-contracted in a freeze-nitrosylation and sprinted to the Quad. eating on the way a fistful of sunshine, a century of mildew and shavings of marble. relentlessly intrigued, racially burnt, discussed dissected and experimented on.

i was humming a Beatles tune, rolling my eyes, clicking my finger tips on Massachusetts Avenue when norah yelled from across the street. an ex-neighbor, virgin and decidedly scholarly. orphaned in teenage, miserable in her 20s, she became a hermit in training, reclusive and suspicious, with an airy voice, granular and monotonic. the deep-rooted sexual primacy, buried in a chimerical cage, made her wildly numb; an inner tempestuousness breaking the perimeter of promise. back to my world, across the street, spinning tales, lies and drugs. norah, what's up? i asked, curiously. i got bit by a dog the other night, bad baaad Booty, she said arduously, i may have rabies from the smuggled pup. her phone rang. the sound, a piercing cadence, pressing through an orange leather purse. oh yes mom, he drugged the nanny last night and... i walked away, unknown to me the life of the nanny. and my ex-neighbor.

into the face of Virgil and tourists, a garden of bricks, a monument of words and studios, i sat by Straus D, clicking photographs on my memory and listening to the chuckle of an Ivy gay, a Jamaican and a transistor; memorizing history, confusion and Vonnegut. my bitterness about philosophy, beginning on these very footsteps when Russell kissed a frog and said to me, the fundamental crisis that man faces is loving everyone but himself. in truth, in comparison, in the variegation of mnemonic, we argued at the brew house on Dunster Street. appropriating the meaning of 'loving yourself', the outcomes, the placebos, the canonizing and gentrifying, the undulating Harvardian raking in contempt, shriveled in remorse for a resonating hypocrisy; calling yourself a raven, a cormorant and a field star, curling in ulcer and uremia of your brain. i need you to learn to love yourself, first, Russell, and then plead the cases of Curie, Amis and Plath. to compare, to verbalize in the spirituality of Salinger, pompous in your white washed neighborhood. what money and your entitlement did to you was loathe yourself at the cost of appreciating contemporaries, wary of an alternate reality, in a pit of poverty, in the third world of mine. you pointed it out wholeheartedly, preachy, on our second night at Harvard. i have never forgotten, never will. as you continue on your mission of entitlement, privilege and philanthropy, hating yourself, doing good for the exterior of your smile, it is my hope that you will un-click a pittance, a grueling punishment and let yourself rise. in the philology of self, the biology of winds and consequence of minds.