Sometimes I write songs and sing them to myself, sometimes I start sliding down the internet of random facts. I find it interesting how Mexican hot chocolate needs water to reach an extreme boiling point in order for it’s best to come out. I find it frustrating in life that I sometimes have to reach heightened level of frustrations in order to do the things that I should have just done in the first place but maybe, oddly in some sort of way the sweetness of life is so much sweeter when you know how hard and hot it was to get there. Here’s a short story I wrote sitting in my car eating ice cream and finished sitting at my desk drinking coffee. Enjoy.
like water for chocolate
Ornithology is the study of birds. I’ve always been interested in birds and how they ride the sky so free. When I was a second-grader, I started reading chapter books. I would always pick up the weird ones, my mom said. That was just her way of calling me unique. I know she loved to see me reading, even if it was the back of a cereal box. She had wished I had rubbed off on my older brother. I read so much about birds I started obsessing, wishing I had the freedom to fly. My agitation would build up, and I would jump off 3 or 4 steps, thinking I could take off into the sunset. Ride the clouds over the art museum returning home just in time for dinner on Fridays when my mom would hop off the 23 so she could pick us up some hoagies on her way back from work. I could not fly though I would --for the most part, land on my feet. Even if I could fly, would I be too scared of the heights it would take me?
I almost peed my pants in the 4th grade when Antonio Jones dared me to jump off the top of the slide. Would I fly, or would I fail? This wasn’t some little slide either. Let me just say I’m scared of heights, always have been, but Antonio was fioneeee, beautiful, stunning. I had first learned the word stunning when I read about the Indian Peacock. Antonio had these brown-black eyes, a fresh haircut, and was wearing the brand new Jordan taxis. He had the power to make a 9-year-old girl feel like she could fly. Let me just add that Antonio, the love of my 4th-grade life, had the Jordan Jordan’s like from the gallery, not the one’s down on 52nd street that my mom would buy Leek sometimes. Leek would leave them in his locker at school on purpose and tell my mom they got stole because he was too cool and couldn’t be bothered with wearing the ocky version.
I was not cool. I read books about birds and made paper dolls with magazine clippings. What I felt for Antonio had to be real love, or so I thought at that age. He talked to me at recess when he could have talked to anyone else! But he spoke to me. There was a heartbeat in sweaty palms when he sat two people over during reading time. My pot-shaped heart boiling over when he asked for cuts in the lunch line. Whatever it is that you feel in elementary jumped off that slide and landed on something metal. They had to call my mom cause I had a hole in my arm. It wasn’t a hole hole, like a big hole in the wall, but Leek hyped it up cause he liked to see me get in trouble. My mom cussed me out without using a cuss word. I remember it like yesterday. “Nadiyah, you betta be glad that’s the only thing that happened to you, little girl, cause if you had broke a bone, I would have broke the rest of them to match! I don’t know what’s wrong with you flying after some lil boy!”
As a little girl, I believed my mama didn’t understand love. I had never seen her even look back at a handsome man who would whistle at her in the street. She wouldn’t let the nice man at the store hold the door open for her, and she huffed every time she saw somebody kiss on tv. So here I was trying to show Antonio that we could be a family of Golden Eagles, inhabiting the same nest for a lifetime. We could listen to Al Green as we fed our little baby birds because from what I saw on TV, that’s the music that always played when two people were really in it for the long haul.
Like a mute swan, I just sat on the bench during recess for the rest of that year. Reading my books, learning about the birds and how the world moves around them. I would be a grown woman one day unfearful and free to move around the world like the birds do. I knew my time would come to fly.