Since the day I went to school for the first time, the first light of day has lost that welcoming gleam it used to have for me. As I slowly woke up in my bed, I would stretch, turn and let the bands of sun hit my thin legs sticking out from underneath the covers.
With the beginning of school days, I lost my right to those long morning naps, that special right to going back to sleep because the credits of my dream did not roll yet. Since primary school I have been rushing from one thing to another, meeting one deadline after ten others and still not seeing the end of these endless list of accomplishments to be had. In this sense the life as we have structured it in the 21st century feels more like a computer game with endless levels to master and with perhaps no tangible reward other than seeing our name in a list of top players after we have spent the last of our nine lives.
All of this kind of thinking above naturally constitutes, and distills drop by drop from my decades old negative thinking. Like smoking, a habit one can not kick, mostly because every cell of my body is addicted to this bitter poison that seems to poison everything I throw myself into. In this sense, I sabotage most of the things I start, and the opportunities that come my way by blind luck. There comes a time in your life, whether it be your thirties, your teens, or perhaps after you're over the hill, you realize, you just can not continue living like this. Not only is it hard to wake up in the morning, it is even harder to go to bed knowing tomorrow will be yet another day of defeat.
So why do you ask, why is defeat so certain, so imminent, so here, but so intangible. It is because I give life to it. It is hard to look at anything you create objectively, whether it be a child, a painting, or an argument at the supermarket. My failure is kind of the same. I know I create it, I know it is bad for me, yet I feel attached to it with a mother's love for her first born ugly retarded child.
I wish they made a patch, a piece of gum, or perhaps a set of pills I take every day except for the last week of the month for this addiction. But there is no such quick fix.
I have always said that the degradation of one's mind is like falling off of a cliff. Although the event happens pretty fast, much distance is traveled vertically. If one happens to survive the fall, he has to get up, dust off, and somehow find his long way back up. Many people choose to remain at the bottom of the cliff; this is not a poor choice by any means. Who could argue that the top of the cliff was a good place to be in the first place? It was windy, perhaps exposed to too much sun, there was no water and plus it was lonely. There are lots of people at the bottom of the cliff and misery seems to always create company.
On the brink of my thirties, I have just been able to get a to a point where I can catch myself right before I hit my ego with a bomb, just before I step into the interview room and pull the trigger to turn myself into a human bomb, exploding on the interviewer's face with bits of my selfless effacing clouding up the room.
The great thing about our busy, crazy, hectic daily lives is the fact that they provide enough distraction for us all to ignore these core issues. Instead, we keep icing the cake, adding more elaborate patterns. As we add the layers, the structure underneath first weighs down then starts to sag and perhaps for some of us, eventually, it gives way completely.
They say that when a big cookie crumbles things get awfully sweet and messy. I wonder what happens when a small cookie crumbles? Does anyone ever know?
Shredded and shed, she a restless blur
ruptures the sheath of my years past
and becomes my reason to forget.
She, the flourescent yellow highlighter,
drawn under every line in every book,
stares on into my toddler eyes.
She, the subject of every truth and dare game,
wants me to play with her heart, and break it.
As I cunningly calculate her demise,
a bank account accumulates the sum of her first tears.
She questions on while I lie on my back
with no coherent reasons for what I have done.
Without a powerpoint presentation to save my ass,
in that meeting room where my destiny is sealed
I sit in my chair quietly waiting for the judgement to air,
yet the channels keep changing,
but the news she and I are expecting never comes on.
She, a restless twitch in my perfect reflection
with the lipstick smudged around the edges,
tells me what's right and I listen on.
Within the firm grasp of her arms
I am taken to the awkward beginning.
Her perfume is an untold story,
her scarf a sea of silk crashing in my face.
Her necklace leaves a red outline in my neck.
Soon her body wraps itself around me like a snake of love.
I give in to what has arrived at my door.
Though no one is knocking, I can hear her breathing.
Troy James Vega
May 2002
ruptures the sheath of my years past
and becomes my reason to forget.
She, the flourescent yellow highlighter,
drawn under every line in every book,
stares on into my toddler eyes.
She, the subject of every truth and dare game,
wants me to play with her heart, and break it.
As I cunningly calculate her demise,
a bank account accumulates the sum of her first tears.
She questions on while I lie on my back
with no coherent reasons for what I have done.
Without a powerpoint presentation to save my ass,
in that meeting room where my destiny is sealed
I sit in my chair quietly waiting for the judgement to air,
yet the channels keep changing,
but the news she and I are expecting never comes on.
She, a restless twitch in my perfect reflection
with the lipstick smudged around the edges,
tells me what's right and I listen on.
Within the firm grasp of her arms
I am taken to the awkward beginning.
Her perfume is an untold story,
her scarf a sea of silk crashing in my face.
Her necklace leaves a red outline in my neck.
Soon her body wraps itself around me like a snake of love.
I give in to what has arrived at my door.
Though no one is knocking, I can hear her breathing.
Troy James Vega
May 2002
Category :
Wherever we go, whatever we do, however we live our lives, we can always depend on one thing; our mothers. They are the rock in our lives, the source of every single cell in our body, and perhaps the starting point of every dramatic family meltdown. Our mothers manage to go to bed every night talking about something not done that day, and wake up the next morning with the previous day's list of to-dos not accomplished to a satisfactory level AND new tasks that must be accomplished before the end of the new day. Before there were post-its, we had our moms to serve as the bitter reminders of every mistake we made and every to-do we would like to avoid in our simple daily lives.
As for my mother, you just need to know her and if you are somebody in Istanbul, you probably do. She is a modern day Coco Chanel who not only is very educated and well mannered but also enjoys the joys and luxuries of life. I think my mother never really knew what poverty and hardship are. And you can not really blame a person for having a pretty privileged life. As I have always said, my family is not rich, we are just well off (depending on the every so turbulent Turkish Economy.) When I say we're not rich, what I am getting at is the fact that if we were to stop working we would not be able to sustain the same lifestyle we have today. My parents work hard and perhaps in some ways can never really be compensated for their hard work.
For the first eighteen years of my life, my parents lived their entire life within the context of the university they are so dedicated to. So no wonder I turned out to be so attention starved; even against my best efforts I can be attention seeking even when I am just standing there. It is amazing how our body language gives so many things away, and all the while we're thinking we're so sly.
My mother's discontent started with my move to the US. I guess she always imagined this to be a temporary move for education purposes only. She never intended me to stay here for more than ten years and then to top it off turn out to be gay in the end. To this day it is her firm belief that America made me gay, specifically the city of Austin.
At times painful, at times entertaining, and many times just darn right depressing I have to live with the fact that I decided to come out to my parents in September 2002. This was one of the hardest choices I made, and to this day, I still change my take on what happened. Don't get me wrong, this was a horrible, painful, horrible ordeal for the three of us. It really was the last bout of pain that played out with New York City in the fall for my backdrop.
My mother expected the world from me, and she still does. Good looking, smart, educated Turkish men are supposed to marry well and have beautiful healthy and smart kids that go to the best schools. It is this strange cycle of unreal expectations. Perhaps someone lives this happy and ideal life somewhere but I have yet to see a family in Turkey that had a less than perfect facade to it. I think all these lofty expectations result in mid-life crises, unhappy families, screwed up kids, and of course drama.
My family is not Greek, neither are we Italian nor Jewish. So you can understand my astonishment when I found out the disfunctionality common in my family exists in Italian and Jewish families as well. The same behavior of the mothers, the same crazy expectations, the full nine yards. So what is the connection between all these different cultures that aligns them so close to endless bouts of drama?
As for my mother, you just need to know her and if you are somebody in Istanbul, you probably do. She is a modern day Coco Chanel who not only is very educated and well mannered but also enjoys the joys and luxuries of life. I think my mother never really knew what poverty and hardship are. And you can not really blame a person for having a pretty privileged life. As I have always said, my family is not rich, we are just well off (depending on the every so turbulent Turkish Economy.) When I say we're not rich, what I am getting at is the fact that if we were to stop working we would not be able to sustain the same lifestyle we have today. My parents work hard and perhaps in some ways can never really be compensated for their hard work.
For the first eighteen years of my life, my parents lived their entire life within the context of the university they are so dedicated to. So no wonder I turned out to be so attention starved; even against my best efforts I can be attention seeking even when I am just standing there. It is amazing how our body language gives so many things away, and all the while we're thinking we're so sly.
My mother's discontent started with my move to the US. I guess she always imagined this to be a temporary move for education purposes only. She never intended me to stay here for more than ten years and then to top it off turn out to be gay in the end. To this day it is her firm belief that America made me gay, specifically the city of Austin.
At times painful, at times entertaining, and many times just darn right depressing I have to live with the fact that I decided to come out to my parents in September 2002. This was one of the hardest choices I made, and to this day, I still change my take on what happened. Don't get me wrong, this was a horrible, painful, horrible ordeal for the three of us. It really was the last bout of pain that played out with New York City in the fall for my backdrop.
My mother expected the world from me, and she still does. Good looking, smart, educated Turkish men are supposed to marry well and have beautiful healthy and smart kids that go to the best schools. It is this strange cycle of unreal expectations. Perhaps someone lives this happy and ideal life somewhere but I have yet to see a family in Turkey that had a less than perfect facade to it. I think all these lofty expectations result in mid-life crises, unhappy families, screwed up kids, and of course drama.
My family is not Greek, neither are we Italian nor Jewish. So you can understand my astonishment when I found out the disfunctionality common in my family exists in Italian and Jewish families as well. The same behavior of the mothers, the same crazy expectations, the full nine yards. So what is the connection between all these different cultures that aligns them so close to endless bouts of drama?
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