the habit of being

I can’t decide whether to be Salome or a communion girl today, so I guess I’ll just be me.

Hormones, like a sine curve on acid:

Scene One, Knowledge: Oh I am giddy, high on my own fantasies and so glad for everything suddenly. I want to dance and to scream. Science is a pearl and we are energy and you make me feel like an excited electron in the light reactions of photosynthesis. The fog lifts and there is nothing left to desire. Remember: sex, laughter, safety may be all.

Scene Two, Confusion: My whys get reversed and the word beauty starts to grate against the insides of my mind, screaming and knocking back and forth, mad from overuse less understanding. Faith is probably so simple after all and easy, I never should have admitted anything, the hardest states to achieve are those of least external complexity. And blasted art and science, what the hell, what are they, which is what and where’s my definition, where’s my reason, where’s my logic and my resolution?

Smart People Write in Third Person:

A little girl in jeans and a tee-shirt and long wavy hair sits on a blue sofa in the middle of the student union center. There are stairs in many places, but signs say not to sit on them, hence the sofa instead. (Sad that even Southern universities will not allow stair-sitting; someone could get in the way.) She wonders if anyone notices her, and if so, could they perhaps, just maybe, think she is a college student, or a child prodigy even, if her baby eyes give her away. She’ll take her chances, yes, but she is careful to leave a sign reading “Don’t Touch!” on her notebook and novel, when she ventures away from the sofa-not-stairs, blue, to the game room or the bookstore or the TV lounge. One exclamation point is enough, two could seem childish. Try to stand up straight, you are tall enough to be one of them, at least.

At the vending machines, as she is getting a Mello Yello, three college boys approach, looking at her, and the walls of the nook seem to close in. One of them asks if she wants a piece of candy, and she backs away, staring at the floor. Who are you kidding? Someone tosses a peppermint at her feet, they all laugh, and start to walk away. One boy murmurs “listen to mommy.”

She looks at her watch. “Mommy” is in class. Fifteen more minutes, and she decides to head toward the picnic tables in front of the biology building, after retrieving her things and her sign. There’s an owl in a big cage outside the biology building, and an eagle and a hawk too. She can look through the bricks in see them sitting on their perches, with eyes that cut things and talons, how she gazes at the tight little talons. Classes begin to file out the doors.

The picnic tables. Mother and Friends sit and discuss class. There is Danny, who started his own computer company, made enough money to buy a Porsche and quit work all together to do back to school and become a doctor. And Natalie, of “Natalie and Petra,” the girl’s second known lesbian couple, who plays tennis and card games. Lynn, who is iced tea with lemon personified, sweet, with her funny eyes and funny voice, even her funny house out in the country. Anne, who is in the coast guard and can navigate using the stars. The guy, what is his name, who once without on a date with a girl who jumped him and said “hurt me.” All these people are familiar yet strange, and the girl sits and listens to them talk science.

Again, today:

I dreamt we were bathing together, and you were washing my back with a yellow sponge, when suddenly you just stopped and laid your cheek against my spine. The whole scene just froze like that, and it was perfect, that simple. Maybe the heat lamp was on, maybe everything was red. (I wonder if we associate red with passion because we were taught to do so by example, red roses on Valentine’s Day, etc., or because there is just something innate about the color).

It really would have made a lovely photograph, too. Though I hate for a thing to be flat, and I couldn’t tolerate a glossy finish.

The Girl is Me, Obviously, and I Hate Third Person:

Anne teaches at my school now, but she’s been out for a while because her son, my little brother’s best friend, has brain cancer, and he was not doing well. He’s going to make it, though, for now. So thin, so pale.

She wrote me a letter of recommendation, and talked about how she remembered me sitting at that table when I was so young (4th, 5th grade?). She said I could grasp concepts then that were hard for college students, and sounded so sincere in her letter. I don’t remember grasping anything though, it was long ago.

There was more to come. As a graduate student, my mother taught Human Anatomy and Physiology laboratories, and she had a key to the bio building and we’d go late at night to set up her labs for the next day. There were dark hallways and empty classrooms and lecture halls, microscopes (slides of whitefish blastula, I actually remembered that) and refrigerators full of things I wouldn’t dream of eating, fetal pigs cut open and all sorts of creatures in jars, skeletons of cats and birds and people alike, and drawers and drawers of bones, labeled. “Oh, will you put this in the fibula drawer?”

By that time I was in middle school, but it never dawned on me, even when I got to use drosophila in my 8th grade science fair project and blew everyone else away, that being brought up in this environment, watching people dissect cats when I was 8, getting to hang out in the neurospora lab when I was 13, was anything abnormal or interesting. I never liked science classes in school, because my teachers were always incompetent (Miss Martin told me mitosis was too hard for 6th graders). Not until I got into AP Biology did I even realize I was good at science. And it hit me, I’ve been seeing this my entire life. I love biology so much now, and there was a time when I could have feasibly gotten to use a scanning electron microscope, if I’d shown any real interest at all, and I was so young, and I didn’t even realize, I took it all for granted, the biology building smelled bad.