Category: Life

Because it makes very little sense for me to take part in it, for my daily English hour I am sent instead to the Computer Science lab. “Lab” is perhaps a little too indulgent of a name. I’d consider it more appropriate to term it “attic”, even though, strictly speaking, it’s not really one. It’s on the second floor, in the draftiest area, well-lit but frequently covered in a fine layer of dust. Last year, during a rainstorm, an entire panel of the ceiling fell through. The computers are older than some of the kids, pockmarked, bulky beasts that take between two to thirty minutes to start up, depending on connection speeds, the condition of the cables and a third very mystical condition no one has as of yet been able to pinpoint.

I am rather fond of the Computer Science attic. I chose Biology over Computer Science this year, so I don’t get to see much of it anymore. There are usually more computers than students, so the one at the back (which I call Ol’ Faithful or Ol’ Unfaithful depending on how fast it’s running that day) is pretty much reserved for me. Ol’ Faithful/Unfaithful is my favorite because, despite the cracked modem and the broken switch on the screen, the keyboard is in excellent shape. Shiny, black, rounded edges, a pleasing pop! when you press a key – it’s great stuff.

I don’t do any really productive work in the Computer Science attic. Since I finish off the projects assigned to me quickly, I spend the majority of the time browsing Wikipedia. Browsing Wikipedia is a wonderful thing. The endless trail of “See also” items! The little known facts of sushi, Fitzgerald and the sinking of the RMS Lusitania! The surprisingly useful trivia! The excerpts of doctoral theses, poetry anthologies and various books! The occasional literary gem! The satisfaction of editing a minor grammatical error on the History of Human Rights page! Wikipedia, like clean feet, shiny glass panes and almost perfectly round circles, makes me happy in a way that is difficult to explain to people. In fact, most things about me are difficult to explain to people.  Today, for example, I saw a poster some fifth-graders made about “The Little Prince”, which they credited to Antoine de Saint, who is actually named Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I don’t know why I reacted quite so vehemently to the exclusion of part of the author’s last name (I went as far as to stab the poster with the tip of my finger, quite irrational behavior indeed), but I do know it perplexed my conversational partner quite a bit.

This isn’t the only thing that seems to perplex. My voyages to the Computer Science attic confuse my fellow classmates as well. It’s been five years since the trips started, and still I’m confronted by kids asking what I’m doing there, either sheepishly or aggressively, never something in between. “Well,” I usually say, “my English level is too high to be taking an English as a Foreign Language class, so I’m doing some work up here instead.” I’ve considered answering with something outrageous (“I’m filing the director’s tax returns!”), but considering that this is a school environment, and I have zero ability to pull off a convincing a sarcastic remark, that’s probably more trouble than it’s worth.

Other than these occasional questions, I don’t usually talk to the students I’m with in the Computer Science lab, though I know most of them by name. There’s a rather curious exception, however: when I walk in, and when I leave, a voice from somewhere in the mass rings out: “Buenos días, Emma” and “Adios, Emma”. I am pretty sure the person in question is male, and a bit younger than me, maybe by three or four years. I don’t know how he’s managed to remember my name, or how he’s concealing himself in the crowd so well. Must be magic.

In any case, now, when I enter and leave rooms, I hear “Buenos días, Emma” and “Adios, Emma” in my head. It makes me feel comfortable and well taken care of and just thoroughly at peace, like I’m zooming along on a convenient moving sidewalk, or levitating a few millimeters off the ground, or just generally acting like a happy, non-angsty teenager. I am not quite sure how a customary greeting/farewell cycle instigated this kind of emotional response, but hey, I’ve known for a while now that I do weird stuff, and said weird stuff doesn’t make my life any harder. Quite the contrary in fact, and I figure I might as well stick with stuff that works.

And that concludes today’s segment of THINGS EMMA WRITES ABOUT WHEN WHAT SHE REALLY WANTS TO DO IS MAKE DEVILED EGGS BUT THERE IS NO MAYONNAISE IN THE HOUSE.

How do human tissues react to the passage of time? How much of my anatomy has stayed intact? If I weighed six kilos at birth and at present weigh several times that, what parts of my original body have remained? What parts have formed along the way?

When I look at my foot I do not think of a foot that is sixteen years old, as the entity I know of as “me” is, but rather a foot that has morphed into several incarnations over the last sixteen years. The foot of my newborn self was one eighth of my current foot. Nail, skin, bone, red blood cells have reproduced, died and been cast off into the surrounding medium. 30 liters of water, several dozen kilograms of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, a few grams of salt, chlorine, iron – we know what it takes to make a human being! Gestation is the process by which elements are assembled, following guidelines and utilizing tools impossible to replicate artificially. This is nature’s trump card, leg up, ace in the hole. A body in the process of formation is perfect. How long does a body exist before it begins to decay?

Red blood cells develop from committed stem cells in bone marrow. They are in circulation for an estimated 120 days before dying off. The cells lining a stomach last a maximum of two days. Granulocytes, a variety of white blood cell, the stuff that keeps you alive on a daily basis, have a lifespan ranging from 10 hours to a few days. Macrophages eat the dead cells, and they in turn are eaten by other macrophages, once their 16 days of programmed service are up. The cellular lipids and membranes of a neuron are continuously renewed, bone cells are kept alive by satellite cells.

How long before my first body has shed itself away completely? When I look at myself, I see a life form in various stages of degeneration, several identical reincarnations extending from each other.  In the mirror, I can pull back my sleeves to reveal scar tissue on my shoulder, the pink melding into the surrounding reddish-brown skin, the stretch marks on my stomach, the small grey freckle just beneath my nose. Sometimes I wake up and the soles of my feet will have hardened a bit, or a line on my skin will have diminished somewhere, or my stomach, kidneys, head will feel lighter. Though, logically, I am dying always, I prefer to think of it as being brand-new always. This is both a termination and a continuation.

At three thirty, two hours before I am due home, my desk partner begins investigating a strange smell emanating from his backpack. We are in Math class, and I am finding it difficult to pay attention to functions when he’s got the bag on the table, and his entire upper body stuck in it.

After a while his head, a little disheveled, emerges, and then a hand gripping a napkin. He gives it a perfunctory glance, as though accustomed to textiles in its state of disrepair, before returning to his rummaging in the bag and the search of the That God-Awful Smell. By this point I have almost totally abandoned my attempt to follow the teacher’s explanation and am watching him like a camera man filming a chimpanzee encountering a foreign termite mound.

Suddenly he shoots back up and exclaims: “I KNOW WHAT THE SMELL IS! IT’S MY SANDWICH!”, in the tone of: “I KNOW WHAT THE MEANING OF LIFE IS! IT’S MY SANDWICH!”

And then he proceeds to tell me it’s as old as a month and a few days, and hey, is the napkin disintegrating? Oh, why, yes, it is, hey Emma, is that even possible?!

And that’s when I started guffawing, and my good girl image went straight to Hell.

Cuando es invierno en el mar del Norte
es verano en Valparaíso.
Los barcos hacen sonar sus sirenas al entrar en el
puerto de Bremen con jirones de niebla y de hielo
en sus cabos,
mientras los balandros soleados arrastran por la superficie del Pacífico Sur
bellas bañistas.

Eso sucede en el mismo tiempo,

pero jamás en el mismo día.

Porque cuando es de día en el mar del Norte
—brumas y sombras absorbiendo restos
de sucia luz—
es de noche en Valparaíso
-rutilantes estrellas lanzando agudos dardos
a las olas dormidas.

Cómo dudar que nos quisimos,
que me seguía tu pensamiento
y mi voz te buscaba -detrás,
muy cerca, iba mi boca.
Nos quisimos, es cierto, y yo sé cuánto:
primaveras, veranos, soles, lunas.

Pero jamás en el mismo día.

Ángel González

(We read this in Lengua class and it, spoke to me? Something quite like that.)

“These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.” — Charles Manson

A veces, las palabras se posan sobre las cosas como una
mariposa sobre una flor, y las recubren de colores nuevos.

Sin embargo, cuando pienso tu nombre, eres tú quien le da
a la palabra color, aroma, vida.

¿Qué sería tu nombre sin ti?

Igual que la palabra rosa sin la rosa:
un ruido incomprensible, torpe, hueco.

Ángel González

(And because I am wonderful and too lazy to translate the previous, longer poem, I shall do so for this one.)

Sometimes, words situate themselves above things like a
butterfly above a flower, and they cover themselves with new colors

And yet, when I think of your name, you are the one who gives
the word color, aroma, life.

What would your name be without you?

The same as the word rose without the rose
an incomprehensible noise, clumsy, empty.

Ángel González

(Note that I am not an academic, and that this loses 200% of its power in the translation. I’m helpless.)

Almost immediately (hell, who am I kidding, immediately) that poem made think of a certain someone. A Certain Someone. A CERTAIN SOMEONE. Crazy magic stuff, and I want to hit myself, and then I think of this, something I wrote in the margins of my English notebook:

WHAT IT TAKES TO COMMIT A CRIME, OR CONFESS YOUR LOVE, WHICH REALLY AMOUNT TO THE SAME THING, IN MY MIND

Equal parts gut, gumption, all stupid. Optional, but highly recommended: good boots.

I hate the look, feel and sound of my mother’s crying. It’s not so much the implications as the act itself: ugly, rolling down in fat, butchered sweeps. She looks younger than ever when she cries, as much as twenty years younger. Perhaps I am so affected by her crying because it shows me the time I will never recall: the days she was not my mother.

Once someone told me I am at my most pretty when I am crying. I think that’s true of a great many girls, maybe boys, though I have only ever seen a few of those cry. Most people would say the beauty of crying is its vulnerability, but I don’t think I agree. When I cry, I go to the bathroom and stare hard at my face. Then I wipe my runny nose with toilet paper, sit on the floor and think to the future, to the days I will not be crying.

My face when I cry is flushed, but that itself is not discernibly sad. The color is warm, red blood vessels contracting underneath dark skin, pleasing even to a critical eye. My mouth, which has always been small and and my most trustworthy feature, does not falter. It can somehow, miraculously, still the picture of my collapsing brow, but never the eyes underneath.

Something about the whole damn thing is aesthetic. Not necessarily pretty, like that someone once said, but definitely aesthetic. I have yet to decide if it’s a car-crash aesthetic or a zen-garden aesthetic.

When my mother cries, nothing about the scenario or her face is attractive. I want to clasp her arm, I want to punch her as hard as I can. When she cries, I become someone I don’t know, someone who can comfort and cry at the same time, a someone who can hold her mother while praying for the days she’ll never have to cry again.

How absolutely perfect that my SAT test date (SATURDAY) coincides exactly with my menstrual cycle.

Thanks, universe.

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