Waterworn

 by Jem Ashton

The brine flies scatter across the sand, making space for you. They let you into the water. Let your heavy footsteps sink into the wet ground. This cloud of flies sounds like waves. The waves are quiet. This body of water pushes you back towards land. Its force moves up your legs as you make your way slowly into its depth. The shallowness is astounding.

There’s an expanse ahead of you. Depending on the direction, it’s either literal or metaphorical. An expanse of water leading your eye beyond the horizon into the sky. Or the expanse of industry. A refinery that reminds you of the human reach - incalculably dangerous and infinite. Both of these infinities are embodied by you - a body of nature, a product of humankind. You’re right to want to be there and the water is right to reject you. 

You’re home - this is where you came from - but you don’t belong here.

It’s only quiet because you haven’t made a noise. It’s in your nature to be a disturbance - why don’t you say something? Are you saving your voice to disturb the quiet somewhere else?

Pick Up the Pace

Pick Up the Pace

by Jem Ashton

Walking the dogs can be a frustrating experience all year round, but especially in the Fall. Denuding trees drop scents from the skies. These scents, unreachable to my dogs at all other times of the year, are now conveniently at their level and the temptation to tear away from the sidewalk to stick their noses in any pile we pass is high. In the late afternoon of December 9th, 2024, they were on their best behavior. I felt proud of them and, after an unusually busy weekend, I was relieved to be sharing an hour of peace with my pets.

As we walked down 900 East, a fairly busy commuter road just outside the heart of Salt Lake City, I heard a voice behind us. I ignore voices. It’s none of my business. 

Dolly, my boyfriend’s dog and the older of the two, gently diverged from our path to sniff a tree trunk. This was acceptable - a gentle request to explore the olfactory world that is essential to their being but a mystery to me. Giving her time with the tree trunk, I stopped walking. My booted footsteps ceased; the auditory layer of our environment quietened. The voice that was behind us became more apparent. 

I looked toward the approaching figure and his words became clear. He was saying faggot.

“Faggot! Yeah, I’m talking to you, faggot!”

Dolly wasn’t done sniffing, but we had to go. I had to go. The dogs were still ignoring the voice, but it was now all I could think about. No more sniffing. I quickened my pace. The voice continued to call out. Faggot, faggot, faggot in repetition among other words I couldn’t quite make out. We turned a corner and he stopped, but the voice kept rushing through my head. I didn’t slow down. 

When we got home, I let my boyfriend, Kyson, know the dogs were on their best behavior. They did a great job and it was a good walk.

“...and some guy called me a faggot.”

It’s his instinct to try to solve my problems, even ones like this. He wanted to figure out some way to report this guy. 

“There has to be somebody to call.”

There isn’t though. There’s nobody to call when you’re called a faggot. What good would it do? Technically, I could report a case of harassment to the police, but it’s not like it will actually do anything. They can’t do anything when “some guy called me fag on 900 East.” Regardless, I appreciate Kyson’s instinct to make it better. We should expect the world to be better. We should expect to feel safe. 

This dog walking route is one I’ve always felt safe on. It’s become the standard, the one we go on most, because it’s where I had never been called a fag before. I’ve been called a fag in Liberty Park, downtown, or on busier roads plenty of times. On the nearly empty sidewalks of the quiet neighborhoods surrounding our home, it had never happened. I was taken by surprise.

In the past couple years, I’ve been called a fag more than ever. Despite the fact I’ve done everything I can to draw less attention to myself. I’ve deliberately started dressing in generally more “masculine” clothes - at least when I know I’m going to be alone. When I know I’m going to be safe in a safe place with safe people, I’ll go ahead and fag out a bit. Otherwise, I’ll do what I can to draw the least amount of attention. On the walk, I was wearing jeans and a completely unremarkable winter coat. I felt unremarkable. 

“I just don’t understand what I’m doing,” I say, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

In the past, I wasn’t so afraid and I didn’t give a fuck about how people would react to me. I was wearing purses on a daily basis (they’re convenient), I’d wear makeup, I’d wear outrightly feminine clothes. I was so much faggier, but I was rarely the target of harassment. Now, I won’t even use a tote bag, I never wear makeup, and I go full “normcore” most days. I’m more of a target than ever.

To be fair, I dropped the makeup more so because it didn’t fit the vibe I’m going for anymore. The purses, however, I stopped using after some old guy in the neighborhood yelled out “eww, it’s even got a purse” a few years back on another dog walk. The rest has changed gradually after years of voices calling fag have gathered in my mind.

Each time it happens, it brings attention to how much of myself I’ve stripped away to feel safe - to feel like I’ve decreased the chances of being unsafe - only for it to have not really made a difference. I’m dressing differently, I’m being perceived the same. Men on the street are still calling me a fag. I am still a fag. 

The harassment is more common now, but it isn’t new. When I was 19, I was leaving the train station on my way home from work close to midnight when a man approached me from behind, grabbed my shoulder, forcibly turned me around, then said “oh, sorry, I thought you were a bitch.” Nope, just a faggot. It was on my way to this same job on another occasion in broad daylight when a group of younger teens slowed their car to yell out “dick or pussy?” Both instances were months apart. I reacted to both feeling weirdly satisfied rather than scared. Oh so you think I’m pussy?

The underlying threat of violence has always been there, but it didn’t click until an instance a couple years ago. It was near the end of Summer and I had started a new job at an environmental nonprofit after graduating with my bachelor’s degree. I was working on moving our office to a new location: packing, packing, moving, packing. I was in shorts, listening to music, kind of prancing around. I was having a good time. Then, a man on the street very aggressively said that word.

Faggot!

I’d heard it before. No big deal.

I’ll stick a knife up your ass faggot!

That was new to me. I hurried into the office and I locked the door. He came up to the window and kept saying it. I picked up my phone and mocked a phone call, which prompted him to leave. Maybe this was one time when I should have called the police. It was a real threat of violence. They never would have come in time to do anything about it though. He had already turned down another street, never to be seen again. So I thought. The next day, there he was again. I went inside. He was yelling the same things, this time adding slurs that didn’t even apply to me, but he didn’t come to the window. He just kept yelling as he made his way down the same path as the day before.

This is when it finally clicked that anyone who’s called me a fag out on the street genuinely wishes harm upon me. They want me to be hurt and they might even want me to be dead.

It was also the kick-off of a long year of being the target of harassment with unusual frequency. At least once a week, somebody would call me a fag and I’d hear that threat of violence.

It would come in places where I used to feel safe: crowded parks, busy streets, the grocery store. Each time, I’d ask myself, “what did I do?”

The frequency has lessened a bit now - maybe just once a month - but I know that’s in part because I’m hiding more. I don’t walk the dogs in the park as often. I’m more cautious in public when I’m alone. I’m doing more to just look less gay.

I don’t know what’s changed in my community. I could probably find a way to neatly tie it to the political moment, but I honestly don’t care what the source of the problem is. Whatever it is, I know it’s largely out of my control and I can’t do anything about it. I feel powerless. I feel like I’m in danger. I feel like I need to get out of here. 

That feeling became very clear in my mind after a trip to New York City earlier this year. I was visiting my cousin in Brooklyn for a weekend. We saw an extremely gay play, we were going to gay bars, guys were winking at me and waving hello, we were making sweet conversations with people everywhere we went, and it felt cartoonishly welcoming overall. I was enthralled, I felt at ease, and I felt safe. Then, the day after I got back to Salt Lake City, I was paying for parking at my gym when I turned around and the guy standing behind me in line looked at me dead in the eye and said, “fucking faggot.” The first words a stranger said to me after returning from my trip.

Maybe, despite being a “blue bubble,” Salt Lake City isn’t the hub of progressiveness that it claims to be. It’s still in Utah, one of the reddest states we’ve got.

I know New York City has its share of assholes. I’d be called a fag there too, I’m sure of it. I’d just hope it’s more often in a way I like it, because I do like it sometimes in a kind of fucked up twist. But it can’t be coming from some random asshole on the street, especially not as often as it happens now. It’s a cutting word that’s severed me from my sense of place and my sense of community here in Utah. I have a wonderful community here, but it’s shrinking as people move away. Maybe it’s time for me to pack up and go find a community somewhere else. This is a problem I don’t mind running away from.

Introducing Me (DRAFT)

 By Jem Ashton

When I was a little girl living in Taylorsville, my parents played tennis at the nearby high school’s court in the summer. My sister and I would usually just hang out on the court eating M&Ms, which I liked to turn upside-down, because the flipped M kind of matched the Wilson logo on the tennis balls. 

“See? Now they match.”

An early sign of what I could later call sensibilities and just one example among many of what I could later call queer sensibilities - an appreciation for order, aesthetics, and little amusements. I wasn’t only interested in the fact that the flipped Ms resembled the Ws, I was interested in creating a consistency. When the M&M Ms matched the Wilson Ws, they became part of the tennis experience. They were no longer a random candy that happened to be here with us on the tennis court, they belonged here.

Order and consistency created belonging. 

My childhood was filled with belonging, despite the fact that I liked to dress up in my aunt’s old dresses and my cousin’s princess costumes. Despite the fact I consistently chose the path of womanhood when my family played a game of Life. That when Mrs. White wasn’t an option for me during a game of Clue, I’d go with my reliable backup option, the faggoty Professor Plum. Aside from an largely unexplored and completely random interest in baseball for a brief period, everything I did as a child seemed to be in opposition with the gender I was assigned at birth. For a long time, I didn’t notice, because I didn’t have any other boys to compare myself to. The only other kids I knew were my sister, Madeline, and our first three cousins: Isabella, Fiona, and Emma. The kids I knew were like me - I thought I was just being a kid.

When I started school, I naturally befriended the girls in class. During recess, we would run around the playground acting out the macabre and fantastical stories we’d come up with together. The cracks in the blacktop were silk webs where the giant spiders might bite our heads off. The field down the hill was forbidden territory where gangs of raiders might shoot our heads off. The towers of bridges, slides, and monkey bars were predictably castles where another awful thing might happen to our heads. Imagined danger was everywhere. These stories would follow us back to the classroom, where Ashlyn, my best friend for years, and I would write them down. Our teachers would say “this is… creative.” Yes, it was.

As the years went on, the distinction between me and the other boys grew more apparent. The reaction to me almost exclusively having girl friends went from “ooo the girls like him” to “oh…he’s kinda…” and I could feel that change. The change in how people looked at me. I thought I was just being a kid and I’m certain the kids I knew thought so too, but the adults in my life thought something different. In their eyes, I was being queer.

I was being queer.

Outside of school, even moreso. Whether at home or at my grandma’s house, playing with my sister or with my cousins, the roles I took on in our imaginary worlds spread across the gender spectrum.

“Pretend I have short hair.”

“You do have short hair.”

“Girl short hair.”

I liked the names Rachel and Paige - inspired by an instructor in one of my mom’s workout tapes and the character from Charmed, respectively. As a boy, my characters were named Bob, Bill, or Max - less inspired. Regardless of my characters’ name or gender, they’d often wear a dress. Primarily because the chest of dress-up clothes at my grandma’s house only had dresses, but also because I loved wearing dresses. Even after more traditionally boy-ish options were added to the dress-up chest, I’d go for the dresses for as long as they still fit my growing body. If I had to wear a boy costume, I’d opt for the cape. I didn’t mind the cape - made from red velour with a gold trim, it at least had the potential to billow theatrically, to give my costume some drama.

Despite my vested interest in theatrics, dramatics, and embodying characters, I never took up acting. My family existed in a self-wrought isolation, imbuing my sister and I with a pervasive shyness that I’m confident wouldn’t have taken root in us under different circumstances. Social situations outside of my family and school were largely non-existent. We would only go to the community pool if it was completely empty. We were discouraged from seeking extracurricular activities. We were rarely allowed to visit friends and it was even rarer that they were allowed to visit us. The message was clear: socializing is a burden and it should be avoided at all costs. 

I understand why my parents did this. They were in their early 20s, raising two kids who (the math would argue) were life-altering accidents. After having been through my early 20s myself, I understand now that people of that age are only technically adults. In the infancy of their adulthoods, my parents were ill-equipped to raise children, as are most people in their early 20s. They weren’t ready for us, they weren’t able to rise to the occasion, and while I have learned to empathize with their situation, I have yet to find it in myself to forgive them for what was a turbulent and overall harmful childhood.

While I never felt like I didn’t belong, it was clear to me from a very young age that the place where I belonged most - with my family - was dangerous. My sister and I found relief in periods of neglect, because that’s when we didn’t have to worry about enduring another violent outburst from our father. We were starving, but we had some peace. It feels absurd to say it, but one of my favorite childhood memories comes from one of these periods. On a Sunday night, my sister and I were sitting on the kitchen floor of our family’s house in Eagle Mountain, flipping through cookbooks to see if there was anything we could whip together with the ingredients available to us. We hadn’t eaten the day before and we hadn’t eaten yet that day, but we were going to do our best to change that. Turns out there’s not much you can do with just flour, canned baby corn, and ketchup. Our little brothers were out of sight. Finn was downstairs playing video games he definitely should not have even been aware of. Liam, the youngest, was either sleeping or playing with dolls - completely unsupervised in either case. Words like “neglect” and “abuse” hadn’t entered our joint lexicon yet. Madeline and I had already been chuckling at our woefully unsuccessful attempt to find anything to eat - spirits were high despite our reality - when she said, “I feel like we’re orphans”

I thought that was hilarious. 

We were just like the sad orphans in old children’s cartoons and that was so funny. We started riffing on the concept, putting on accents and begging imagined pedestrians for money or food. The bit ended with us sitting cross-legged, holding hands, chanting in gibberish to summon a hot meal.

We went to bed hungry that night, after failed attempts to convince our dad we had no food. He was sure we had waffles in the freezer. We definitely didn’t, but he wasn’t going to be hassled to check. To protect himself from being inconvenienced, he willed himself into believing his children weren’t starving. 

At least we got a laugh out of it.

That’s more than we can say about the times he’d drag us to the cold storage room to destroy our toys in front of us or the times he’d throw us on the ground and so forcefully smother our crying with his hand that our noses would bleed. 

In high school, after my family moved back to Taylorsville, a favorite line of his when targeting me was “this is a good family, don’t you know how lucky you’d be to be in this family, if you were gay?” Said through clenched teeth and with a red face, of course, while jabbing the air around my face with his tanned finger. As if not being homophobic excused him from over a decade of ongoing child abuse, as if I hadn’t heard him make homophobic comments in the past, and as if I were at all worried about being gay. I knew I was. I was perfectly fine with it. My life was filled with people who already accepted me for being queer and I couldn’t care less about my family accepting me - I’d be fine. My friends accepted me. On top of that, they never hit me.

Throughout high school, my friends and I bonded over our miscellaneously dysfunctional families. We’d make fries together, try to imagine our futures, and trek to the Utah Pride Center in Salt Lake City every week for what was supposed to be group therapy but was more just a bunch of queer kids talking about whatever - something we all needed anyway. My friends who had jobs were kind enough to pay for my bus fare. We’d get there early to look through the free clothes and eat the free snacks. I got my favorite winter coat there - a high-necked puffy-but-sleek down coat that’s black with a blue fleece lining - and it keeps me warm to this day. 

After high school, I got a part-time job as a receptionist at an escape room in the dying Gateway Mall downtown and enrolled in classes at Salt Lake Community College without any real plan of where I wanted that to take me. I’d bought a cheap laptop using cash I’d saved from “friends” who’d give me money after we hooked up - they called it gas money. With that, a job that barely required sentience, and a willingness to endure late night classes, I was ready to chip away at building a future for myself. Without a specific destination in mind, I enrolled in whatever classes interested me, but focused on topics related to writing. Writing, I thought, had the potential to lead me to careers that involved minimal human contact. After two years, the time came when I needed to pick the major that’d be printed out on my associate degree. After that, I guess I’d need to figure out the rest of my life. I decided I didn’t want to do that and transferred to the University of Utah to give myself another two years. I liked school anyway - it was safe, it was what I knew. I wasn’t ready for the future and this felt like slowing life down.

I was disappointed to find that life did not slow down. I dated a wonderful, bipolar addict who still captivates me. I had a brief stint with serial monogamy. I’ve landed in a problematic age-gap relationship with a hoarder, who I can’t help but love despite the 20 years between us and all the clutter. Aside from my sexual-romantic relationships, there’s been continual familial drama, growing pains, straining gender dysphoria, a horrific global pandemic, lovely animals around every corner, a flourishing love for making books, and so much more! A life like any other, I know, but it’s the one I know best and the one I can write about.

Three Poems, Three Stanzas Each

 By Jem Ashton

Good Bird

Tangled between lines

I say to myself good bird

What was meant to be girl

almost became boy

blurred 

and was bird instead

For my dentist, I am so

Sweet candy

you say I’m good

You can see I’m flossing

and indeed that’s what this is

Flossing for you

and I will not stop my flossing

For the job you want

Dressed

alone in my apartment

Straight up and down

chest to thighs, flat

What do you want to be

        and I wish I could say dentist

Dry Dirt Heaving

 By Jem Morgenstern

Sophia watches a worm. Whichever end that’s poking out of the dirt - equally likely a head or worm butt - is wriggling in slow chaos. It flicks up, to the left, then the other way. It all seems uncoordinated and thoughtless. Its lack of movement either outwards or inwards makes it seem even moreso. Has it lost itself in a panic? Is it struggling to make its way wherever it planned to go? Sophia doesn’t know, we don’t know, and the worm might not either. As its body slams against the dirt, clumps that are crumbs to the human eye but must be boulders to the worm are shoved to the side.

“Where are you going?”

Assuming the worm would be more comfortable buried entirely, Sophie uses nearby wooden detritus as a makeshift trowel to shift dirt to the worm. She’s safe to assume her action was helpful, because she can no longer see the worm struggle and she will never see this worm again.

Satisfied with this moment being the end of her distraction, Sophia rises from her kneeling position and stares into the distance. The ruins of the North stretch beyond her eyes. The sight reminds her of the mud cities in the South along the trails traveled by her courier troupe before the group was dissolved for a reason unknown to her but obvious to several other members - they just couldn’t cut it as couriers, in part due to Sophia’s lack of self-awareness. This trait of hers was a fault then, but it serves her well now as a Klein, a designated wanderer of the still-unknowable wastelands. When she stepped into the Office of Designations after her troupe’s dissolution, the Marking Officers only glanced at her before assigning her new designation. Her spirit was clearly unsettled, unrestrained by a course that must be maintained, ready to be cast off in any direction. 

Her walk begins again. She decides to go deeper into the North Ruins. As she follows the disquieting allure of the distances in the North, further and further from this point where she shared dirt with this worm, her footsteps are light.

The worm, now alone and confused by this girl’s choice to bury his head, senses the stillness in her absence and pokes his head back up from the dirt. She’s gone and he is comforted, though his setae are now sore from his panicked thrashing. He hasn’t surfaced for a long time, preferring to linger in the dark, comfortable underground and to forget the acrid wind above. 

Since the Great Wind Cataclysm that transformed the world so drastically, the earthworms were fortunate to experience only slightly more drastic mutations than the humans - mutations that mostly affected their psychology, leading to changes in their social structure. While humans did become less social due to psychological mutations, they have maintained a largely community-focused approach to structuring their society. Worms, on the other hand, experienced psychological mutations that pushed them past the point of community. The structure of their society changed drastically. They no longer formed herds, as their ancestors did. Group decisions of any sort were largely abandoned, with the exception of together deciding to go in opposite directions when coming across each other when digging. However, although the instinct for socialization had mutated out of their genetic makeup, the need for socialization hasn’t gone away entirely. That is the reason for this worm’s occasional journeys to the surface. To satisfy his need for some socialization, he will surface to witness life. With his head poking out of the dirt, he will look up and hope to see birds, giant wildedogs, or even a wandering Klein. This visit to the surface has so far been a disappointment - he leaves the underground to notice, not to be noticed. Sophia’s attempt to comfort him was agitating and it set him behind schedule to an extent that felt unforgivable. He had not witnessed enough life to sate his need for socialization, but he would soon need to return to the damp dirt below to avoid the gullmen, who would be emerging from their nests as the sun set and the dimmer sun rose.

The hoarse, twittering yells of gullmen in the distance signals the end of his experience on the surface. He turns around and quickly makes his way through the dry dirt layer, heaving clumps as best as he can with his limbless body. Tomorrow, he will surface again and he will have a more pleasant experience. After which, he will express gratitude quietly to himself. He is grateful for the mutations that have granted earthwormkind with gelatinous, human-like eyes with which they are able to witness the world, and he will be reminded of how much a gift these eyes are after his next attempt in the morning.

Minutes on Asphalt (DRAFT)

By Jem Ashton

In the second month of a new relationship while on a weekend road trip to a small town in the desert - one that’s more of a byproduct of tourism than an earnestly charming podunk - my then-new boyfriend dragged me to the one bar in town where fags might not get stared down. That weekend, fags were actively welcomed, actually. The local queers put a bare-armed effort into staging a full-fledged Pride Festival that drew queers in from all over the region. It also lured in some queers who intended to “just pass through town” but couldn’t resist the timeless charm of pop music barely audible through amped up bass and rowdy, drunk homosexuals. 

One was a rugged man with gray hair, tanned skin, and a beard that reached his sternal notch - bare, only hidden by the same chest hair that would guide your eye down to a vertex held together by a shirtbutton below his chest. He said we - me and my then-new boyfriend - fit the vibe for his company, which was looking for models. We should consider modeling, he said. He didn’t say what his company was and we didn’t ask, but we enjoyed his company enough to make him our friend for the evening. We kept talking and he stood behind me during the long wait for drinks at the crowded bar. He was passing through town with his husband, who was somewhere else in the crowd, and they caught wind of the party. They liked road-tripping on their motorcycles, they liked meeting new people. He liked our look - or maybe or looks, as distinct and separate as they are. 

He brushed his rough, asphalt hand along my wiry forearm and I shifted my weight back to lean fractionally closer to the affectionate man standing behind me at the bar. With the gentle movement of our bodies - shifting to drink or make way for the flowing crowd - his belt pressed into me. His body pressed against mine. My fraction of a step became whole and I pressed myself against him, signaling I welcomed his belt, his body. Signaling I welcomed his body pressing into me. 

He asked for my number, saying he wanted my number to keep in touch about the modeling suggestion, but I caught a glimpse of a more familiar invitation in his eye. His cheeks were rosy with lust and beer. His eyes were heavy like ripe fruit, plump and ready with visions of seeding fertile earth. 

I gave him a fake, because I wasn’t sure I wasn’t crossing the boundaries of my then-new relationship. Would my boyfriend mind my minute flirtation with this stranger? I both cared and didn’t. My fake phone number felt like the middle ground. 

I was saying “yes.” 

I was saying “no.” 

I was getting what I wanted and I was giving it up.

Because I took the lazy way out of a tricky situation, that was the end of the road.

A Great Flood

By Jem Ashton 

My knuckles are rubbed thin by my persistent, aggressive, maybe unnecessary handwashing. 

In the cold weather, the thinned skin cracks and my knuckles bleed. Sometimes, I don't notice for awhile, only realizing my injury when I finally have reason to look at my hands and see the frozen blood dew - dark red and sticky - on my knuckle peaks. As soon as I can, I wash my hands again. I rub the blood away along with more skin. 

In the following days, I'm more careful. I treat my hands gently. I talk myself out of believing every surface is so nasty that I need to rub away my skin after touching anything. I remind myself I need a healthy dermal layer to protect myself from germs. I moisturize, do what I can to retain the oil my skin needs to survive. Scabs form, my skin heals. 

My hands look good, as if I never washed my skin away.

I was raised a colonist

by lei molis

I never took my essays to my mom. I always asked my dad to look over them. He was the English major, the White Man, the writer. It made sense. What never made sense to me was the uproar from my Samoan mother. “Why don’t you ever ask me to read your essays?” she would ask. Naively, innocently, stupidly, invidious I would reply, “Oh, well I didn’t know you wanted to.” But it was more than that, and we both knew it.

 

It was my little winces each time she spoke in church. Her words choppy and backwards, just slightly the wrong shade of palagi. White, but barely. Eggshell, perhaps—the color she painted my brother’s room after he moved out. She had wanted a fresh coat of white to cover the doodles he had added in his stage of teenage individualism (brought to you by: America in the early 2000s). How she had not realized the paint she chose was not the white she sought, I do not know. And it really shouldn’t surprise me. After all, this is the woman who bought sugar-free yogurt, sugar-free ice cream, sugar-free oatmeal, not because she wanted to lower our sugar intake, but because she didn’t notice the giant red letters on every side of the carton that read: “SUGAR FREE.” And you know you really couldn’t get mad at her for it. Of course, I still found my ways, but no, not when she would so innocently and honestly admit she didn’t realize it was sugar free when she bought it. 

 

So eggshell and sugar free, these were just the versions of White I had to put up with. And that’s how I saw it, really: something to be endured, to wince at. Order order order. Ironic, isn’t it? How desperately I wanted to stand out, and yet how strictly I could police her for making us different from the sea of White who surrounded us.   

 

“Why don’t you ever ask me to read your essays?” It wasn’t even something to consider—ridiculous, laughable. “Well, I didn’t know you wanted to.” It was more than that. It was how I seemed to zone out every time she started talking during family scripture study. Speaking vaguely. Repeating phrases I assume she heard in church. Attempting to paraphrase, summarize? the verses we had just read, but it only came out as regurgitated scripture. Plagiarism. Like those Christian missionaries had indoctrinated her ancestors’ tongues until they became a broken record for their whitewashed daughters to roll their eyes at. No, I wasn’t playing the apathetic teen card; dad would chime in and immediately my ears would perk up. As if grace were only legitimate if starched. Dressed in a suit and tie. Spoken in perfect English. As if principles were only principles if pronounced in perfect succession. Correction. It’s just because we are grammar geeks, we tell ourselves. We the women molded to police other women. The children trained to correct the parents who were once children in a new land, miles from their island home. The children of diaspora. Peoples of the pacific relocated to America, trained to be the very mouths that called them cannibals. 

 

Like the woman who sat in our dining room. Messengers of God, our faith would have us believe. And we did. One from Hawaii—American. Another from Tahiti—not. We had just shared a meal with them. I was 16 at the time. Confused at my direction. Impressionable, listening. Listening as the Tahitian poured her soul into new American English that felt clunky and awkward in her French-trained mouth. But she was a messenger of God, and a good one. She would not let grammar rob her of an opportunity to speak of God’s goodness to a family trying to live in the shade of His grace. And yet her companion—a child of Oceania in some ways, too—would. As she spoke of love and grace and truth and hope and beauty, her American counterpart with brusqueness inserted “he” or “her” or “him” each moment she stumbled through her pronouns. Thinking back, I am annoyed all over again—if the meaning is delivered, what does it matter the format? Aepeita’i, in shame I realize, I am no different from her. 

 

We dress grace in shirts and ties. Declare a love that is intended for all. But is it grace still if that all refers only to those who can fit their mouths around American words? Well-versed in a selection of Mormonic phrases perfectly polished and performed? “Please bless the hands who prepared it,” “nourish and strengthen our bodies,” “I’d like to bear my testimony,” “I know this Church is true.”

 

I know this Church is true.

 

So, life is full of hypocrisy, and I stand before you, asking you to acknowledge the beauty of a populace I once scorned. Gently, inwardly, but scorn nonetheless. A populace I am half a part of. Which part?, I ask myself. If not the leg or the arm, the eyebrows, the mouth? Perhaps somewhere someone knew this mouth could do damage to ‘Western legitimacy,’ so they bent it and twist it and teach me to tell myself, “I just love English. I love grammar and spelling. It’s all that I’m good at.” I’m an editor, I love editing. Correcting. Making you more like me. Isn’t that all a colonizer does, really?   

 

High maka maka, mama called it. Shook her head at her brother whose college education and affinity for palagis turned him White on the inside. Or eggshell, maybe. Because the words, though big, which he weaved into his prayer, were right, but barely. Or because he said them with such authority no one dared question his usage, maybe. Not a round hole, but a square peg with a surface area two digits too high. Maybe. 

 

Even Dad scolded me for my constant corrections. Compared me to the neighborhood connoisseur of grammar and language. She was just a daughter like me, seasick from the shaking of her head against the grammar-ignorant phrases of her father. But not sick of the sea, as I was. Sick of the boat my mother should not have been fresh off of. How many decades had passed since she set foot on American soil anyhow? Was the soil she stepped on too Hawaiian enough to be American? (Hence the terms like “high maka maka” and “hanabuddah (or hanabata)” or “shi shi in a cup.”)

 

Losing a mother changes your perspective on the world. “To lose your mother,” writes author Yann Martel, “well, that is like losing the sun above you.” In the years since losing my mother, my sun, I have sought her in any crevice, any corner, any crack in the cruel fabric that separates my reality from hers. And while I know my sun is not interchangeable with the light that pours all over Oceania, over le atunu’u o lona fale, there are rays that overlap. It was these areas of overlap I craved. The way an aunty would roll her eyes, click her tongue in disapproval, mutter, “Oka fefe,” under her breath. The way any Samoan would laugh—a music book of memories to my grief-stricken ears. The way the mouth of a sacred Samoan aunty, with her hands lifted in prayer for me, carved over and around the letters of her prayer, forging new paths through English pronunciation—new to others, perhaps, but not to me. Sounds I once might have scorned. Sounds that are now reminders of a mother’s love for her child of diaspora, who didn’t ask to be diasporic, who didn’t ask to be lost in a world where someone who pronounces “bowl” like “beaux” can’t possibly have opinions, much less wisdom regarding the role of nihilism in Crime and Punishment or the nature of God.      

There’s a line to a song I sometimes think about. It’s not a song I think my mother would have liked, but still, it reminds me of her in some ways. “There's no point in trying to take ourselves so seriously,” the singer croons. And the drums kick in. 

And I think of her laughing. I think of the time the two of us curled over, almost in tears from the laughter that rocked us. The laughter because of her English that broke mid-sentence. My hands deep in half-moon pie dough, seeped in sticky and tired from kneading with all my afakasi strength (which wasn’t much). “Eh,” she had said, “haven’t you ever heard of,” a pause as she searched for the words, “...da kine too much?” She finished weakly, wavering, but not with confidence, with laughter. And the dam that broke. The laughter that ensued. How we roared and wheezed at her English that broke mid-sentence. At the seriousness that gave way to her utter love for life. At the joy that spilled all over her words and into my heart through my fingertips into our pies and everywhere else between. How Dad had turned his head from the computer screen, confused, what was so funny?, he asked, but no words could explain.

And that is perhaps why this lesson took me so much to learn and still I keep unlearning: because it is a space without words. Beyond them. A space where laughter tells you all you need to know. A space where my mother—with her smile, with her love for God, with her ability to fit the pain in her pocket long enough to be present in those pews, with her quiet reminders to an elder sister to not let bitterness eat you up inside (reminders auntie would cling to and think of every time she spoke wrong, every time she looked up at her dead sister’s picture), my mother with her refusal to stop caring, stop loving, stop fighting for a world for her children to thrive, with her jokes of death and ‘chemo brain’ because what’s the point in taking ourselves so seriously?, with her smiles at the doctors and nurses who prodded her for the second half of her life and in return she gave them something to laugh about, a reason to smile, with her refusal to be anything but who she is—a land beyond words where my mother resides. This place I cannot find. This space so foreign to my displaced, Western-disciplined, grammar nazi me. 

 

A land it took her dying for me to seek. 

So, I suppose it’s a loss worth smiling about, for in searching for my sun, I found the darker parts of myself.