Coming Home Again

Coming Home Again
-- Change-rae Lee

I wish I had paid more attention.

                      I feel as though it is easy for people to self reflect back on the things that they could have done better, critiquing and condemning themselves for not doing a better job of it.  Having your mother pass away still at a young age, which I am assuming the son is in his late twenties, is hard.  

                      I was actually just thinking about this the other day.  After finding out that an old friend from my younger educational years had passed away at the ripe age of twenty, I sent my beloved a text message asking, "Is twenty-one the age where we lose the most people?"  Right off the bat I could name five people I were either friends with, graduated with, of knew of enough to know that if we crossed each other in passing, each would say hello.  There is still this one girl, my friend from middle school and onto high school whom I lost touched with.  I knew she had gotten pregnant shortly after graduation, and knew that she was trying to become a better person.  I saw her from behind in the grocery store.  I remember getting nervous and a little bit afraid-- of what I don't know.  But whatever it was boiled up inside me and caused my feet to face the opposite direction.  It was the last time I ever saw her alive.  Thankfully we had reconnected on a social media sight a month before her sudden death.

                       But chatting with pre-made emojis and words that don't do the mood justice will never have been enough.  She got into a car accident, was put in a coma for one week,  had the baby, and then died-- the both of them.  Her boyfriend was the only one survived by them.  I constantly think of all the things I could have done differently that day in summer when I was in no more of a rush than I am now.  (Currently sitting in the cafeteria, staring at my bowl of empty soup.)

                       You beat yourself up.  Curse yourself for not knowing that that was the last visual image your brain will ever recollect for you.  And I put this into play with the Son.  He didn't realize the impact of his Mother's sickness.  His ignorance was due to his age, and the boarding school was something temporary while his parents were a symbol of something infinite.  But nobody is infinite.  And when they pass during an age where death has not become apart of your life yet, how can you know how to handle it?  You can't.  All you can do is quarrel with yourself about the things that could have been said, could have been done, could have been cared differently so that at least they knew, you loved them too.  It is the unforgiveness of yourself that is a battle with.  And I think this story does an amazing job in analyzing this very feeling that so many of us have gone through.  The ending is left open ended.  We don't know for sure if the parents reconnected and were kissing, if they were sleeping, or if they were merely just sitting there, letting tear after tear flow.  We don't see the other side of these things.  And we never will.

Edison, New Jersey

Edison, New Jersey
-- Junot Díaz

The game was part of our mornings, the way our showers and our sex and our breakfasts were.  We stopped playing only when it started to go wrong for us, when I'd wake up and listen to the traffic outside without waking her, when everything was a fight

                  The nameless woman who used to belong to the nameless narrator I feel is a symbolization of the bigger picture Junot Diaz was trying to portray in his short story.  Being with someone you love, care about and value to a point where they have become apart of your life becomes a familiar and comfortable feeling knowing that they know the ins and outs of your personality, family background and experiences which have shaped you into the person you are today.  Couples are together because they have shared beliefs, common goals and destinations in which each aide each other into getting for the benefit of one another.  All trust is put into them and yet, relationships don't always work out.  Everything you new is now unknown, everything familiar is now a strange and distant concept to you, they are no longer your lover, but merely a person you used to know.  That closeness is shattered and you don't know what to think or believe anymore.  

                 I used the quote at the top as a gateway to explain Díaz's bigger picture in his short story.  While doing the pool table jobs with Wayne, the narrator, who is Dominican talks of being judged based on a preconceived idea that he is associated with dishonesty and untrustworthy.  The wealthy customers "linger" in the hallways wondering if they should actually leave or not, "memorizing" everything in their house.  The American culture vs. the Dominican almost seem alien and foreign to one another and so when he meets a Dominican women he immediately assumes he'll have a connection with her.  But much like his girlfriend whom he assumed he knew everything about (where obviously he didn't or they would have still been together) he knew nothing of this women regardless if they shared the same cultural background.  He helps her escape back to this Dominican community where, in just a couple of days she returns back, "choosing" Pruitt over her "own". 

                  The way I tied this into the relationship with the narrator and his ex girlfriend is simply this:  a relationship is about similar wanting, needing and things.  But even with an extended amount of time shared together doesn't mean they'll always pick you at the end of the day.  The days ended for the narrator's girlfriend picking him at the end of their days together.  She choose life without him and thus the Dominican woman chose in a sense, the "American way" over the "Dominican Way".

                   Just because you think you know someone, think you have a connection with them, doesn't mean that you actually do.  Maybe you are blinded by the fact that you share one or two things in common, a few at most.  Blinded by his girlfriend.  Blinded by the Dominican woman.  He thought he knew both because of the Dominican woman's shared culture and his girlfriend because of shared intimacy and experiences.  But clearly he didn't.  Because neither did what he thought they would have done.

The Cariboo Cafe

     The Cariboo Cafe

-- Helena Viramontes

But God is just a man, and His mistakes can be undone

             Viramonte's Cariboo Cafe illustrated a lot of jumping around in her mini chapters throughout her short story. I found myself unable to keep up with what was happening, getting confused by the vague way she would start each new section, seeming as though she were changing speakers on me.  I would often have to go back and re read what I read because I was unsure of where these new characters were introduced.  I felt myself doubting a lot of what was going on because of the jumping around.  And then I stopped for a second to reflect on this.  Was it purposeful?  Was the confusion made as a point in the perspective of the quote above? 

             I feel as though in life itself, when something goes wrong we initially will stop in that moment and retrace our steps as to how we got here trying to figure out why we made the choices we did to end up here.  The quote above, "But God is just a man, and His mistakes can be undone"(Viramontes 76) is an interesting way to explain the unexplained.  I looked at this as a blame for what had happened to the mother and her son Geraldo.  She thinks that someone of higher power is responsible for having things end up the way that they did and thus does what she can to get out of "the path" that He had made for her because she fears that it was a mistake.  But was it?  When we go back and try to retrace our steps, and in this case re reading to better understand, we cannot change anything.  It is what it is.  What has happened already happened.  What is being thought has already be thought.  These people after Geraldo will not magically stop thinking the things that they think or coming after him because their purpose of going after him has deceased.  Whatever is going to happen is bound to happen.  And that is where I tied in the quote, my own confusion in the story of having tried to follow along and the author's (possibly purposeful?) way of jumping around from scene to scene, speaker to speaker.  Because at one point the speaker is the Sister, then the Mom, then the cook and there is no concrete way of knowing that this is them, we kind of get clued in by dropped hints from the author by the way they're talking and the way that they're reacting/doing things.  So, does God make mistakes?  Or are these yours in which you don't want to admit?  And if you do admit that they are yours, why did you state the first comment on God to begin with?  What's been done can't be undone.  I think that is the strange reality behind the purpose of this story.  What will be will be.

Seventeen Syllables

Seventeen Syllables 
-- Hisaye Yamamoto

Rosie fell for the first time entirely victim to a helplessness delectable beyond speech.

               I feel as though when someone falls in love for the first time, as cliché as the saying may go, they tend to fall the hardest.  Love, I used to think, was such a unique type of emotion only meant for that "one special" person.  Having gone through my own personal first love heartache, I can confidently say that my opinion on love has since then changed.  Love is not unique at all, but a mere emotion in which can be learned to be felt and learned to be forgotten.  I have great confidence that I will love many times during the course of my lifetime.  There will never just be that one single man.  (Except for right now, right now is that one single man).  

              In Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables, I get the feeling that Rosie's mother is so religiously obsessed with her contribution to writing Haikus as a way to fill the void of a first lover's heartbreak back when she was a teenager.  Anything in my opinion, can be temporarily cured by distraction.  Distract yourself long enough and you put it off.  Distract yourself even longer than "long enough" and you become in denial.  Burdening a secret that has pained you throughout the course of most of your life is a distressful thing to harbor and keep hidden.  

             I chose the quotation above to illustrate the cycle of first lover's love as the beginning of how all first loves start.  This isn't to say that some don't work out, because they do.  However there is always that chance that it won't.  Being in love requires such vulnerability.  But I feel once you're in it, once you're fully surrounded and grasped into what it all encumbers to be.  I am still unsure however what the title has anything to do with the actual story except for the connection that seventeen syllables make up a Haiku, which is Rosie's mother's distraction, which in return becomes a plea for Rosie's mom to beg her not to commit.  

             All of this is very confusing.  But then again, so is love.