middle class fantasy world
Shana Bulhan Haydock i’m sitting in your bedroom in your, no, your parents’ house
they’ve gone away for the weekend and it’s quiet with your cats you’re at work and i was sitting at the kitchen table wondering if an earthquake would rip up the amerikan flag up on your wall or whether the salt and pepper shakers would break first or whether your stepsister’s fifteenyearold bath and body works perfumes would spray around the room in some display of pink decadence or whether the literary erotica you call smut would get drenched in water from the blue glass or whether the dishwasher would squeeze all the dishes into glue or whether i’d finally, finally die i wandered into your stepsister’s room, you see, and i know she bores you so but i envied her dresser and the turquoise green tulle canopy and the casual display of middle class affluence and the pretty photos in their pretty frames and all the pretty clothes on their pretty hangers and the pretty laundry baskets and the pretty pink knickknacks and when i was her age i tried to do something similar in my uncle’s house in the u.s. of a. where i had finally, finally arrived but it was only for a year and i could not get clothes from all the brand new brand name stores so i had kitschy goodwill clothes and i had bits and pieces of a life because you see when you live somewhere only for a year it’s always halting promises even in your middle class uncle’s respectable house on a respectable street even with the most exquisite cat in all the world there is just that rush to the moment where white tiles become trauma, school acquaintances become photographs of names unremembered and facebook connections ungained and you see i would have given anything to be a blonde princess and you see i started waxing my eyebrows and upper lip back then, i’m sure she thinks about these things too but you see i was finally in the zone where i could be a glam princess too just maybe just maybe even though my mother didn’t really have a job, even so i could be a mostly good student but also a teenager and it meant so much and now i am sitting in your house, not your house but sort of your house, and i am sitting on your queensized bed with the amerikan flag behind me on your purple walls and i am losing words to describe a movement across country across continents i am losing words for a desultory return i am losing words for yet another escape and now in twenty something shitty apartments on federal benefits i am leaning on the u.s. of a. and i have still not found the words for what it means to be a home in bedsheet curtains and cracked floors and usedup tiles and in your house that’s not your house shiraz wine sits on the counter that i drank only a few sips of yet again and i was eating digiorno’s pizza again, thinking about the ads you told me about, how i never learned the history of frozen pizza, thinking about how one of the push pins has fallen off your amerikan flag and the cloth is imperfect and i want to rip rip rip chew and spit it out i want to chew till colour soaks my infidel tongue, i want to tell you about an exile that is privileged and perfect “it serves no purpose, it’s art,” you said and i could have screamed but even my paintings echoed canvasses and tubs of paint i could not really afford and even my drawings are made of fine tip pens and even my shirtdress is a brand name brand store indian mall find and even my discount clothes are sometimes from the fancy discount stores and even now as a “poor person” in the u.s. of a. even now in your house that’s not your house where i could get used to living this well i am indeed a caricature of queer folly and so when i told her it was all these things i wanted all these things, what i really meant was it was the spaces between language and neat finery that defined our childhoods and it was the languages we earned through blood we didn’t deserve and blood we never knew and blood we counted through and blood we grimaced over and blood next door and their blood is still the only thing keeping us alive. |
Shana Bulhan Haydock is a young, South Asian, trans*/non-binary and queer writer, artist and activist. They currently reside in Massachusetts, USA, though they grew up mostly in India. They work with The Freedom Center, a radical mental health collective that hopes to provide sanctuary for psychiatric survivors. Shana’s work has appeared or will appear in such publications as the Reveries & Rage anthology, The Outrider Review, (parenthetical) zine, East Coast Ink, aaduna literary magazine, and the Everyday Abolition project.
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