I am sitting on the couch, twenty-four, playing with the last lego man I have left. My dad is practicing Italian on the golden wood kitchen, while my stepmom controls the emissions of sound with knife against wood. I can tell without looking she is cutting onions because it sounds like cutting a skin made out of rope.
***
Italian for my dad means connecting to his roots, roots that he knows and that he doesn’t know, call it DNA, call it interfamilial spirit, call it nostalgia, call it playing with legos even though you aren’t from Denmark.
***
A man has fallen into the river of Lego City, a man is protesting in Lego China, but the media won’t let you see it. The Lego Special Forces make all witnesses disappear on the drawers. A man is dying from Lego Wuhan Virus. I'm the dead lego.
***
I am a lego who doesn’t know how to relax their shoulders, how not to feel like a puppet.
***
Can a puppet become a puppet master? Can a toy play too? What would a lego person do if they suddenly had free will, would they do something or would they stay in plastic catharsis, unable to move, just beings without joints and bones? I am trapped in a yellow jail.
***
When I was six, I built my ideal room out of legos. It was a yellow box with a window on the roof for the lego man to go inside and sleep in sweet claustrophobia, like a turtle. Now I live in a small van, similar and different to that lego room. I remember having premonitions of my mom dying years before she did. Or insights into moving into America. The visions I had as a child make me wonder if the future is really the past, and if living is just remembering the script. Perhaps I can let the dream reel and play itself out instead of trying to control my life as if I were a toy.
***
When I was seven, I decided I wanted Bionicles. But my family couldn’t afford them. I didn’t like that I got one as my mother was dying. My father gave one to me, and one to my brother, in order to numb out the pain. At that moment, playing became a drug. Afterward, a substitute for someone who isn't there. At any rate, I can't imagine how horrible that was for my dad; to be in so much pain, and to still do his best to make his kin feel better.
***
Legos can provide comfort, even when they don’t have hands. As I was staring at my handles, I wondered, what’s so great about playing with toys when you just want your mom to be alive.
***
I’ve been with aunt Clara when her sister died, I’ve seen Sage break down in front of me for multiple reasons, I held and I hold space for people, but how do you hold someone while you yourself don’t have hands, poor heart, poor yellow handles,
***
How do I hold myself?
***
I hope a life after this one exists, and that all those whom I love can be together with me. Sadly, there is no “my way or the highway” while talking with God. A man is dying in lego city, his words are escaping him. There is no way to hold a moment, it just goes, like an exhale, like cum, like not having boundaries, like not picking the right partner, like not having joints or bones, just hard plastic. Try to stay afloat, and make sense of this world.
***
I cleaned my van, my bed, and my clothes this weekend. This makes me feel content because I like cleanliness. But it makes me not want to play the game of life because then everything will be a mess again. Life and bones and legos are made to be used until they melt on a quesadilla accident, or with a lupa or until you step on them with that four-wheel-drive truck that you always wanted, or until you give them away to the next kid, and eventually you forget that you even had toys, or a childhood, or a girlfriend, or desires, and it is so hard to open your paper mache eyelids, and your bones are cobwebs, and your consciousness is soot and dust. And there is a cold comfort in the dark corners of the black and white tile kitchen floor, it smells of eternity, a smell that you knew when you were a child, a smell that you inhabit more and more as you age, until you become the smell of eternity, and you go unconscious, until you don’t, and then you are a kid again, on your grandma’s kitchen, playing with legos, comforted with the sense of familiarity.
***
Maybe you and grandma will take a nap together later.
Comments