Forgetting

"Pacino life, G a roll, casino dice
At the Mirage, Vegas strip, neon lights" -Nas

Sometimes I am terrible to my friends. My brother says I'm synonymous with ignoring people when I dont want to deal with things. Or I conveniently forget things that I'd rather not remember, it's not that I'm mean, but a lot of the time I'm just not in the mood. It can go for months, it can go for years.

I drove past a funeral Thursday morning, I come back home and Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett are dead, one can't forget forever. Working on a wallop of a feature on a boy who has been in the foster care/orphanage system throughout his life. There's pressure, esp. since it's important to me and hits close to home. Most times kids in this situation don't have a choice to forget.
-------

By many accounts, besides the dresses and the shoes, I'm quite frugal. I'm a generic foods, generic detergent, generic medicine kind of girl. And it bothers me for not one second.

Yet a strange day in 2005, I brought a hat for $35, embroidered. A strange day in 2006, I brought a journal and a pen, the combination together must have cost over $40. A very materialistic expression, I suppose. The end of the high school days, the Wendy's days, when I was earning $7 an hour, and when someone under 18 could not work over 20 hours a week. More than 1/4 of my weekly paycheck, which I scrapped and saved as much as I could, went to this beautiful hat, and it wasn't for me, nor was the classic pen and smooth black journal for me. I would go as far as admitting, I would never buy those indulgences for myself.

As with most 17-year-olds, I didn't have money, so why an expression of my love was made with money, I don't know. Each gift had a unique piece of me in it; my mother would have been so mad if she had known. How else can one show someone whose far away that they're special?

The idea of memory causes me to reminisce.

I use to draw faces because it calms me down, every detail of every sketch had to be perfect, had to capture the essence of the person. It needs hours of intense focus. So too does writing a story, somewhere along the road, I lost that piece of me.

At 17, I used to value the seconds. I used to understand where every vein in his body was. I used to understand the callouses on his hands, I used to know the shapes and curves of a thin long torso, and the different shades of color that were there. Today I don't. Today, I cant picture the details of the face, the details of the big bright smile, the details of the mesmerizing eyes.

That's why memory is odd to me, one would think that when you love someone so much, you would remember, everything. One would think that a hundred sleepless nights of worry would cement that image forever in a young girl's mind... one would think that she would remember that the same way that she could remember the anger, the bitterness, the feeling of feeling unappreciated... sometimes I remember those, but I cannot for the life of me... remember him.

Today, I watched this movie about a person getting out of the projects and leaving everyone behind and it brought me back to that place. The gifts were meant in love, but the price comes with the immense guilt in me and causes his heightened yet understandable perception that our two worlds are much too different. A suburban Maine girl buying $40 gifts for a guy from the hood when he and his family can barely afford $40 worth of food a week. How could I possibly understand?

I deal with the adult conflict that Colby urges me to leave others behind, to leave the normal, everyday people, and just chase the astronomical dreams which lie ahead, to make more money than my parents, to not have ever go back to scrubbing floors, or taking orders, to move up the corporate ladder. And it's appreciated and right... and all of this... but is it?

Living in America as a woman is already a huge privilege, but living in America, going to a snooty college, then working my way to the middle class when I know people who are not there, people who take the metro to work 40 hours a week at a measley job and 40 hours at another for an inhumane wage and they dont make as much a girl working some desk job because she was privileged enough to be able afford college.

I dont want to be poor, I would suck as a poor person. But something about the looming middle class, how easy it is to forget the discrepancy in American society, or how easy it is to buy into one's own sense of helplessness in this overly oppressive, powerful, and deceptive system that she does nothing... something about that, something about living my everyday life, oblivious, while people are working their asses off, is unfair and makes me question, why are these powers giving me any of this? What makes me deserve this more than the next person.

And what is he supposed to do when I give him a $40 gift? I don't need my paycheck to pay for rent and heat. I could just save it all for college and dresses and shoes. And I expect nothing in return, I never did, but what does that do to one's pride and manhood when he could do nothing to reciprocate?

One leaves people behind, one doesn't remember, one shows her love with money. I go back and forth on whether I want to remember, yet the lack of memory this week has caused me to question me quite a bit.