I’ve never been so high

3 notes / 2 months ago

andweprettymuchamazin:

You already know what I been on. You know where I be at. Cause men lie, women lie, Numbers don’t I see that.

117 notes / 2 months ago

The aftermath of the Vietnam War follows and off in the distance, one could picture the thousands of Communists celebrating in their drunkenness on the roof tops of every sky-level building.  The rumbling and carousing of Viet Cong soldiers marching through Ho Chi Minh City, the newly named capital was a sound that no one living in Vietnam in 1975 would ever forget.  Any Southerner could hear their treacherous howling from hundreds of miles away and the louder it grew, the less time each knew their family had to flee the south.  The Communists were now in power and that meant all those opposed would either be taken away to “education camps” or killed outright.  The Communist government wanted no chance at another civil war and every day following the fall of Saigon, they scavenged the countryside looking for their prey.

Damp early mornings before the sun rose the men and boys of Vi Thanh, a Southern village in Vietnam, would drag themselves out of bed and prepare for the long day ahead.  They would force themselves to wake, their eyes didn’t want to open but their bodies rose anyways.  Long dragged himself out of bed, eyes barely open and mind still deep in a slumber.  His room was not even a room.  His floor was made of mud and water packed together and his roof only kept out the rain because of the straws of hay tied together.  Every morning, the humid air would stick to his back and this morning was no different.

His father, Thanh, yelled from the front of their home telling him and his other brothers, Hai, Hoa and Huynh to get up and eat breakfast.  The usual meal was rice and dried fish with nuoc mam, a salty flavoring seasoning used by many South East Asians.  This particular morning around dawn the oldest boys in the family rushed to eat their breakfast.  They ate on a dining table, a metal table no bigger than the size of a circular desk, rising not more than two feet off the ground.  Hunched back and sitting on plastic stools, they gobbled down their food without speaking a single word to each other.

They sensed a stench of urgency in their father’s voice today.  Usually, he walked around in and out the house in a slow, precise and purposeful manner but today he scurried, in and out spitting out jumbled sentences likes bullets from out a shotgun.  The boys knew something was up but they were too afraid to ask.   Father always had an intimidating figure, a lean build, and rose up five feet and ten inches from the ground.  Last week, one of the stools broke while Long was eating his breakfast and when father found out; he stormed from way out in the rice field and yelled at him for being careless.  Father took pride in cultivating his rice fields; he did it with the utmost care and expected his all sons to take care of anything they owned in the same way.

The Truong family, owned an entire rice field, this field in particular had been passed down three generations, and it was up to Long, and his brothers to foster it.  His older brothers would do the more physical work; they’d harvest the rice and pull the roots out, and then gently measure the level of water to make sure it was at precisely the right height.  Long performed the easier task, rather than pull the roots, he handled the drainage and the separation of the good from bad grain.  Thanh, their father would oversee all of them, trudging back and forth through the knee high water levels and rows of rice fields, fixing any mistakes his sons, most of the time Long, made.    

Long had done this every day for nearly two years of his life.  Before working on the fields, he would wake at the crack of dawn and head by foot to school.  He would hop nearly the whole three miles with his older brothers down the uneven paved road.  Long, the fourth oldest son in the Truong family had three brothers.  He didn’t fit in with his brothers because they were taller and in general were tougher because of their larger builds like their father.  They were into sports like soccer and so was Long, but after a while his older brothers simply outgrew him.  Although, he finished early at the top of his class at the age of thirteen, education in Vietnam is outweighed by hard physical labor.  The Truong family valued labor and lots of it, because the harder one could work, the more money came in.

After a long day of work in the field, the family, all five members, ate at the dining table hunched over as usually.   A freshly cooked meal made by mother was waiting for them at the table.  They talked with their mouths both full and empty, back and forth chatter about the war, the best rice field techniques, but all in comparison were small talk compared to what came next.  Father stood up raised his voice and was ready to make an announcement.  Anyone sitting at the table could see what he was about to say was tough, it dragged at his heart and for the entire day it had been bringing him down.  Long looked to his older brothers but they all had the same appearance as father.  Fear crept into the room as father opened his mouth ever so slowly and said,

“Your mother and I have been talking for quite a while now and we have come to the conclusion that you three must leave.  We have to do it soon and it must be quiet, before they come for us.”

 “Father, what do you mean we have leave?” said Long, unaware of the seriousness of the issue.

“We have saved just enough gold for you, three to leave the country.  I have given my entire savings for you sons, to leave by boat with your cousins Anh and Duong.  From there, they’ll take you to Malaysia and by plane to the United States.”

“But I don’t want to leave you and Mother.”

“You listen to me, you must go or else we all risk losing our lives.  The decision has been made, there is no other choice.”

Long’s jaw dropped and for what seemed like an eternity, thoughts raced through his head.  His mind catapulted into a vault of never ending questions.  How would he be able to survive?  Where would he live in the America?  Who would he live with?  When would he arrive and how would he know over there is better than here?

All he wanted to do is wake up to his mud and water packed floors and the rows of  hay straws that kept water out.  He wanted to do the easy job of separating bad grain from good grain.  He wanted to go back to being a child hopping down the stone paved road.  And all he could think about is how he didn’t want a single thing in his life to change.  But no doubt, change was coming and boy was it coming quick.

One would be amazed at the quality of education taught at such a high caliber school.  The grand halls of Central Catholic High School explode with over twelve hundred students at the drop of every class ending bell.  Like a tsunami they burst into the corridors at each hour on the dot.  Hundreds of students brushing against each other, the agitation painted onto two girls’ faces from the lack of personal space.  Any person walking through the four story school might notice the joyous smiles, and hear the thunderous laughter as students joke back and forth.   But at any school, no matter the quality or lack of it, contain students that shuffle and sulk across the corridors.  They don’t have smiles and they aren’t laughing at all.  They are engulfed daily into the sea of students passing by.  They conceal their loneliness and wait passively for someone, anyone to discover them.   I can tell you this because I once was one of them.

As usual, Mr. Clements is yapping away about nouns, verbs and adjectives.  He emphasizes sentence structure and the way words are like ingredients to a delicious recipe, but only when they are molded and moved with purpose. Twenty-four other students and I slouch at our desks, the type that connect to our chairs, pondering over the amount of time until we get to enjoy eat our lunches.  The first week of high school and already, he lectures about body paragraphs, concluding sentences, and thesis statements.  We haven’t even had our syllabi passed out yet but there he goes again.

It’s almost the end of the 4^th period and the clock ticks slowly around the hashes.  In class, all of the students would talk but, I liked to keep to myself.  There would be discussions and people would say all of these intelligent statements.  I would simply sit in the back row of the classroom and scoff at the ideas coming out of their mouths.  I thought I had a better way to form ideas in my head but never once would I speak my mind.  Our 9^th grade history teacher, Mr. O’Connor, always ended with the usual philosophical quote, this time with “Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded – Virginia Wolfe.”  End of period bell rings and a flood of students disperse from the classrooms; the time for lunch has arrived.  I make my way through the mass of people and as I do, I hear people greeting each other like they have known each other for a lifetime.  Quite the foreign act because not once have I ever I stopped to say hello to anyone.  I look at people, they look back at me and then I look back away; end of interaction.  No words needed to be exchanged; no acknowledgement of existence necessary. 

I make it to my locker at the one of the corner of the halls.  I place my belongings inside locker four-twenty nine, and my mission to get farthest away from the cafeteria begins. Students still fill the halls, as I pretend to search for my lunch.  Only until the halls are clear and silence is overwhelming do I commit to a direction.  I pretend I have a group of friends and from there walk towards the direction to the cafeteria.  Instead of entering the cafeteria, my instincts tell me otherwise.  I hear the sounds of students laughing inside the cafeteria and for a second, I long for the desire to speak to another human.  But in twinkle, my desire to escape returns stronger now than ever before.  I am like a massive bull tip-toeing across these square-floored tiles.   I follow a line of eight tiles until I enter the bathroom outside the cafeteria.  A rush of comfort takes over as I get closer to that dark corner stall.  The toilet farthest away from the entrance is my place of habitat, it’s the farthest away from the door and in my head,the farther away I am from something the less it takes over my mind.

I want to tell you why I’m here badly but no words are able come out of my mouth.  I want to escape this world and go to a planet far, far away.  For the time being, the toilet seat is my happy place.  I am not on this filthy toilet because I have to take a shit.  I am here eating my lunch and all I can think as I sulk alone and distant from the world, is why me?

rawritsandy:

Don’t be fooled by your emptiness, there’s so much more room for happiness.

33 notes / 2 months ago

They are like tree branches waiting to be snapped off in the winter time.  There is nothing large or normal about them at all.  The surrounding skin tries to disguise the bones but nevertheless, each ulna sticks out like a sore thumb.  They connect my arms to my hands and when you look closely, the passage in between is like a tiny synapse.  Place them under a super microscope and you would see how miniscule and skinny they really are.  When I was little I would measure their circumference with my thumb and middle finger.  My two short 3rd grade fingers would wrap around them and to my dismay they’d meet.  Oh yes, my fingers certainly would meet but even more so, they’d be so close you’d think they could go romantic dates with each other.  If they were sound, they would make the sound of jingling bells accept they wouldn’t be normal jingles, they’d be the soft jingles because hypothetically, if I were to ring a bell that is how they’d weakly sound. People may take one look at my wrists and call them petite.  But man, let me tell you no man wants any physical qualities a woman possesses.  And the hard fact of the matter is that no matter how old I grow or how much I eat; they stay the same, slim, thin and boney.

I wish I could do better by you
‘Cause that’s what you deserve

90 notes / 3 months ago

There’s something about writing that leaves me feeling completely naked.  It’s  so completely humbling when I look back over my past posts and actually read what I wrote.  It’s unreal, because in my head, I can’t believe the stuff that I actually put down.  I got nervous publishing the post before this one because it’s quite personal.  In the past, I probably wouldn’t have posted it but now times have changed.  I don’t have much room in my life for fear and anxiety, because to be quite honest, it has been holding me back from too much. I’ve made a vow to magnetize myself to anything and everything that makes me nervous.  Obviously, it takes a certain sense of recklessness in doing so but for the time being, I’m okay with it. It has been written not in stone but in promise and from here on out it will become reality.  It’s been too long since, I’ve ran in the opposite direction from all that has brought me discomfort.  And now, it’s about time I came to embrace it.

I’m alone in the 2^nd floor bathroom.  It’s the one farthest away from the lunchroom.  I’m sitting in the toilet, hoping no one walks in to relieve themselves.  I’m on the toilet farthest away from the entrance, in my head; the farther away I am from something the less it is on my mind.  I want to escape this world and this toilet seat is my happy place.  Well, not really my happy place but it’s just a mask I’m putting on for the time being.  Stay with me, I’m not on the toilet because I have to take a shit.  I’m here eating my lunch, or what’s left of it.  I’m going to try my best to explain how it feels to be invisible.  The worst part is before lunch.  It’s high school, and in high school we have six periods of class.  Freshmen are the earliest shift of students to get lunch after fourth period.  I feel so fake and invisible.  I’m walking to my locker, it’s 429.  13-34-21. Can you believe I still remember it?  It’s been so long.  But anyways, mines the locker in the corner of entrance.  I’m looking at it now, and the light flickering above me casts a dark shadow over it.  Even though the world is completely light, you can barely see the 429, it’s so obscured by the dark cloud, my shadow over my head. While everyone walks to lunch, I swiftly pretend to walk there along with them.  But today, I head straight for the bathroom.  I’m like a mastermind scoping out and glancing around making sure no sees what I’m about to do.  All my senses are on high, I’m so focused on getting to my happy place that I can hear footsteps from around the corner.  I simply take a left.  Have you figured out that I like avoiding people yet? Obviously, I’m not afraid of them I tell myself; I just want to go to my happy place alone. I start walking down the hall and I’m almost there.  I can see the numbers on the lockers; they increase more and more every year.  I just passed 1290.  There are 1290 plus students that go to this wonderful holy school but I have yet make a single friend?  That’s a lot of people, but I don’t like any of them.  I’m so bitter.  And the world looks so cold at this point.  Just typing about this makes me sad.  I need to stop.  Sorry, bye.