Day 1: Although they legally belong to me...
Although they legally belong to me, the thoughts emerging my skull, the creation of the number of neurons firing electronic impulses across the hills and valleys of my pink brain, formed, once having seeped outside of my body through my scalp, into a thing complete, full, independent from me, a kin to me, a child incubated in the confines of my mind.
It occurred to me that these thought children, the beings composed of a thick tar-like substance but also inexplicably light, unfettered by traditional notions of physics, once formed in a creative exercises or external stimulation, no longer existed in conjunction with me but as a separate entities, still retaining a bit of me, perhaps in the strings of genetic material flowing through my cells. They were my children, and they belonged to me only to the extent that children belong to parents.
These thought bubbles, to put it crudely, first appeared during one of my early morning bus rides to the downtown campus of the University of Houston. I remember distinctly that there were other students on the bus, faces shoved in books.
And then there were other bus riders on the bus, those not students. I recall a black women, whose navy cotton dress which appeared to me that she had over-washed, clean but faded, fit tightly round her sagging breasts and a stomach flap that fell over her waist. There was a young man with her whose skin was even darker than her own, whose thick black hair tufted from his head and held a plastic hair pick of common blue. In her arms, she cradled a sleeping toddler, its chubby legs lazily falling from her strong forearms and his head turned toward her chest, as if he had grown tired looking for maternal sustenance.
All three of the bus riders glistened in the humidity of a early summer morning, and I could detect in the air, the scent of body odor intermixed with the smell of lotion or hair product, the kind of smell you might find in a beauty shop. Occasionally, when the door to the bus was opened, the smell of feces evidently emitting from the child's diaper brushed past my nose, and I couldn't help but scrunch up my nostrils in disgust which resulted in a offended look from the woman.
The young man riding with the mother was a little too old, or so I thought, to be the husband of the woman. The signs of age and experience had not touched him as it had touched her. There were no shocks of gray in his hair. Little creases did not radiate from his eyes or around his lips. There was not the kind of relaxed sorrow in his muscles.
And yet, he appeared to old to be her son. He didn't sit close enough to her. The air between them felt familiar but only to the extent that he acknowledged her presence, looking ever so often at her and the child, saying a few words, mentioning a name. She returned such conversation with an irritated terseness which added a weight to the already odorous air.
Inside my head, the trio of persons began to percolate and I could feel a kind of tightness in sinuses which was relieved as a wave of release moved up and out of the top of my head...
It occurred to me that these thought children, the beings composed of a thick tar-like substance but also inexplicably light, unfettered by traditional notions of physics, once formed in a creative exercises or external stimulation, no longer existed in conjunction with me but as a separate entities, still retaining a bit of me, perhaps in the strings of genetic material flowing through my cells. They were my children, and they belonged to me only to the extent that children belong to parents.
These thought bubbles, to put it crudely, first appeared during one of my early morning bus rides to the downtown campus of the University of Houston. I remember distinctly that there were other students on the bus, faces shoved in books.
And then there were other bus riders on the bus, those not students. I recall a black women, whose navy cotton dress which appeared to me that she had over-washed, clean but faded, fit tightly round her sagging breasts and a stomach flap that fell over her waist. There was a young man with her whose skin was even darker than her own, whose thick black hair tufted from his head and held a plastic hair pick of common blue. In her arms, she cradled a sleeping toddler, its chubby legs lazily falling from her strong forearms and his head turned toward her chest, as if he had grown tired looking for maternal sustenance.
All three of the bus riders glistened in the humidity of a early summer morning, and I could detect in the air, the scent of body odor intermixed with the smell of lotion or hair product, the kind of smell you might find in a beauty shop. Occasionally, when the door to the bus was opened, the smell of feces evidently emitting from the child's diaper brushed past my nose, and I couldn't help but scrunch up my nostrils in disgust which resulted in a offended look from the woman.
The young man riding with the mother was a little too old, or so I thought, to be the husband of the woman. The signs of age and experience had not touched him as it had touched her. There were no shocks of gray in his hair. Little creases did not radiate from his eyes or around his lips. There was not the kind of relaxed sorrow in his muscles.
And yet, he appeared to old to be her son. He didn't sit close enough to her. The air between them felt familiar but only to the extent that he acknowledged her presence, looking ever so often at her and the child, saying a few words, mentioning a name. She returned such conversation with an irritated terseness which added a weight to the already odorous air.
Inside my head, the trio of persons began to percolate and I could feel a kind of tightness in sinuses which was relieved as a wave of release moved up and out of the top of my head...
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