Mima pt.2

"Let's all go back!! Let's all take a rickety row boat out to sea and go back! If we drown, I don't care! at least we all drown together!"

My Mima's lips had the stiffness of a stale sweet roll. If I could, I would climb her jagged nose and slurp from her deep-well dark eyes.

Different kinds of steam were rising from the stoves and from the oven, each carrying their own scents of musks. The afternoon sun revealed the steam's attempt to escape. Some through the hood vent, some through the open windows, wire netting, a cracked sliding door. Out to the blue spring sky. out to join others to become raindrops.

Some steam, though, got stuck. Condensing in the ceiling.

"That poor baby. Drowned in his own mother's womb. Lil' bastard tried to drag Nanis along with with him, too. Uh, uh. Thank yesus, yesus, yesus, yesus, it wasn't too late."

My thighs were perched on a high stool while my ashy fingers were peeling off shells off hard-boiled eggs. My Mima's legs were erect and her left arm was stirring the pot full of gizzards and livers, simmering in coconut milk along with onions, garlic, lemon grass, ginger, galangal, cumin, corriander and her own saliva as she was obsessively slurping the sauce of the ladel to taste.

"She almost bled to death this time around. The first time was simple. That baby came out and left. No fuss. This time, she got up all the way to the 3rd trimester. She was all excited. But then the bleeding started. First a trickle then a gush. It wouldn't stop. Almost all of her blood drained out... And now the doctor said that she's carrying cancer."

"Gary, Terry, Miss Jimmie, Dinner time!"

It was time for the afternoon supper for the assisted living residents where she worked as a caregiver.

"Brandon, Tanya, Dinner time!!"

As a life-long caregiver of the dying, her wrinkles had been baked hard by the god damn sun. The same god-damn sun that shone as harshly in Jakarta as it does here.

"Miss Jimmie, come on honey! Miss Jimmie!!"

The same god damn sun that evaporated her memories of childhood play, snacks and good sex.

"Kara, Gary, come on it's dinner time!"

No, no, no, no,no. The residents weren't having HER food. Her food was HERS. The smell of spicy musk and the taste of sweet savoriness were HERS. That one drop of sweat that skated from her thinning hair, down the length of her arm and into the pot was the mark of ownership. her food was HERS.

"Miss Jimmie, come on honey! Miss Jimmie!!"

On the other hand, the residents were having 90% lean tyson's chicken breasts, marinated in kraft's italian dressing then broiled with a sprinkling of seasoned salt. My Mima poked a breast... As long as the juices ran clear.

"These damn white people would starve if chickens decided to just up and fly. he, he, he, he... Just imagine, old Mcdonald walks into an empty coup... he,he."

My Mima scooped the chicken onto the plates of mushy green beans and mushier chicken flavored stuffing. She wiped the grease and the crumbs off the counter. She delivered the plates to the dinner table two at the time, eight total. opened the medication cart and delivered two sets of meds to two residents. picked up the pots and pans off the stoves and cleaned around liver/gizzard curry pot to create an immaculate halo. Hoisted the them over to the sink to soak them lest they get crusty. She turned on the faucet. ...............................................................................She then... froze. As if her spirit escaped the body.

She began to rotate her neck.... slowly.... up and down. Her shoulders are rising and falling to the rhythm of the wind. It was as if a cool breeze blew through the kitchen, when in fact there was none. With her middle and ring fingers she began to massage the root of her neck.

I was still sitting down, peeling eggs, gazing.

In awe of her deeply worn back, breasts, hips, thighs, legs, feet, toes.

My mima seemed as though she was ready to turn into LIQUID.

The sink water continues to run for no reason.

"I wanted to go back this year, but money is worth less and less and less... Now your cousin has cancer, Anna's business failing, no jobs, that fucking al-qaeda setting up shop in front of my house... I just can't."

"As long as I don't die here. In this country. This country's no place to die."

:"But I still look good, don't I? Not like your other grandma... god, she's turning into a troll!"

"You know why still look good? Mayut told me once... I have a soul of a fish..."

"She actually got that from an old dangdut song:

I have a soul of a fish
Oh when this boat's a sinking
I ain't gonna drown"

Kyle Michael Huelsman's Speech from the DREAM Act Press Conference Monday, November 29th, 2010

Today, thousands of allies across the country came together to make their voices heard. In their presence resonates a call for change, and like them, I see in our faces a demand for justice. No longer shall we sit idly by while our friends, family, and community members are pushed to the margins of society. Right now, on these steps, we ask of our nation to move forward in the direction of respect and equality.

This morning in Boulder, a group of activist dropped a banner off an overpass that read: Dream Act now. Together, undocumented and documented people stood in solidarity of a promise nearly a decade in the making. Hand in hand, we symbolized progress not just for the issue of immigrant rights, but also for that of human dignity. I stand here before you as a white, documented, university student that fights on the grounds of civil rights, because when one of us is in chains none of us are free. With my immense privilege comes a responsibility to speak with those people who are so often silenced. Right now, I can speak only to my opportunity.

Throughout high school, one message never left my side; hard work and perseverance leads to success. Like many others, this is the narrative holds true to our vision of America. Equal opportunity prefaces the freedom that we all hold so true to our hearts. It is the story upon which America began and the story that leads us forward today. In the year 2010, this vision falls on deaf ears as 65,000 high school seniors are denied a chance of a better future. The brilliant, vibrant youth that this nations so desperately needs in our university system, are pushed out of the College tract and. What was for me the American Dream is for many undocumented students the American Nightmare.

Nyai roro kidul and eggs

And there i saw her, Nyai Roro Kidul, the patron Goddess
of the Southern Javanese Sea. She appeared to me
the way she'd always appeared: standing in control of,
yet surrounded by violent waves. From her breasts and
all the way down to her ankle, she was draped with
flowing green silk fabric. Her hair looked as though it had
finally been freed from the prison of a bun, her lips neither
a smile nor an angry frown, and her eyes ready to punish.
She came to me as an arrested image, a frozen figure with
elements of heat and fire. And the tempest she was in was
just simply there. I never knew why she came or
what she was going to do. All i knew was that i,
who was right in front of her, disappeared completely.
At that moment i didn't know who i was or what i was going to be.

Making an omelet is almost like a sacred ritual for me. From the very act of breaking the eggs,
i look forward to dig both of my index fingers into the shell so i can feel a little bit of that cold
refrigerated slime of the egg whites. From there, a capful of milk for every two eggs.
A dash of bread crumbs, and a dash of seasoned (read: MSG) salt.
I pull the whisking fork towards my protruding tongue and taste that salty slime.
More or less it'd be perfect. On a lucky day, i have bacon fat to cook it with, if not,
butter would do. But never vegetable oil. When cooking an omelet with bacon fat,
i have the smell of sweet wood-smoked pig flesh being married with the slightly
sulfuric scent of the slippery ghost of a mother hen
(she'd most likely have been a caged up, debeaked one),
all achieved through a ceremony of heat and occasionally (when cooking with a gas stove), fire.
This union may seem an absurd proposal to nature or to god, but when bitten,
tasted and swallowed, it just feels so right.

Chipotle Brownies

I once tried to convince my mom that chipotle chillies would make a great addition to her brownies. This half joke, half genuine idea was unsurprisingly met with a chuckle and a scoff, then she went on her way to bake her normal brownies. At least that is what i thought she was making. It turned out it was nothing like the brownies she used to make. Hmm.... I thought she had lost all sense of experimentation in baking.

Ever since our family relocated to denver, I was never moved by her baking even though my mom used to be quite the famous baker back in our neighborhood in Jakarta. She now hardly bakes anymore because of having to work full time, in addition to laboring in her other unacknowledged job, one of being a mom. Ever since, she's been rendered exhausted every time she comes home. She also regretted leaving behind in Indonesia her baking recipe notebook she's worked on and perfected for years. She claimed she always had to start all over again because of that. Trying and failing, again and again. Sometimes she got it right, most times... she didn't.

Baking is a very sensitive art, my mom once said. Unfortunately, the ways she honed her craft (art and craft being the same word in indonesian) took place in a particular place and time. She became familiar with how yeast interacts only with jakarta's humidity and temperature. Whereas denver is an alien place for her and for the yeasts she'd been accustomed to. Country crock margarine isn't the 'blue-band' brand she's used to. All-purpose flour seems to constantly turn against her recipes. Cups isn't grams. Liquid ounces isn't milli liters. While she doesn't mind being lost, attempting to invent a way back ,or out, requires a great amount of impetus which she's no longer afforded the time to acquire.

Perhaps that's why she turned to brownie making as opposed to breads and sweet rolls. Brownies are forgiving. You can make them in small batches. You don't have to wait for it to rise. It is relatively quick to make. You can be disappointed with the results yet still be able to wring out drops of satisfaction somehow. So my mom started playing with brownie recipes. The brownies i've grown to expect from her has the texture almost exactly like a chocalate cake. Perhaps that's the way brownies are in Indonesia as i had never tasted a fudgy brownie until i came to the states. She always thought the american version was too rich. But the many times she's attempted the classic 'indonesian' brownies here in denver, the results came out dry and stale. So imagine my surprise when i bit into this batch of brownies that tasted fudgier and denser than any other brownies she's ever made before. You might say it was a happy middle between the cake like brownies of yesterday and the american fudge brownies of today, she even laced it with a copious amount of golden raisins and topped it with chocolate icing, all completed with generous sprinklings of crushed peanuts.

It struck me as odd because this was the first time she made something that tasted like this. It may appear like a brownie i thought i knew, except it wasn't. I stared into her slightly milky, dark eyes and it was the first genuine optimism she showed at culmination of a baking ritual. An eerie and confusing sensation crawled through the back of my neck. It was not a revival of a stale nostalgia for which i always yearned each time i asked her to bake something. Neither it had the cloying flavors of what/should've/could've/would've/been lingering in the back of my tongue. It was something else. Something new, perhaps. I had this sensation only a few times before: the one time was when she first substituted collard greens for papaya leaf to make a curry with, the other time was when she kissed me in the cheeks at Liks ice cream shop late in the summertime. It was where i planned to finally tell her I was gay. The flavor she had was rum-raisin. I was trembling.

I'm afraid to attempt baking. It is an emotionally unsafe territory. The requirement of precision is one of my nameless fears. To trust and follow a measuring device is to surrender my love for unpredictability which makes my religion. Compare the act of baking to cooking stews: with stews you can fail through the process, purposefully if you'd like, and try to fix it through the addition or subtraction of an ingredient and/or simply let the stewing time work its magic. At any point in the cooking process, you can watch, taste and see it transform. Experimentation becomes just another way of quick self-gratification. It is an unstructured playground for gut feelings to run around, play tag or hide-and-go-seek, without the risk of crushing disappointments. Seasonings and spices are added according to the moods of the tongue. Textures are merely dictated by the limits of whatever meats and vegetables you happen to have on hand. Measurements are done by flippant bodily gestures that if taken outside of cooking could possibly belong in the realms of adult sexual play or adolescent diversions. Words like pinches, dashes, spits, sprinkles, palmfuls, crushes. Whatever comes out at the end does not require a name.

Baking, on the other hand, requires plenty of names. Names of proper measurements, names of exact times, names of the end products. For a novice baker like myself who's been too coddled by the perilous instinctive freedom of 'regular' cooking, baking imposes a bondage i wasn't prepared to submit to. A bondage to precision, a bondage to proper techniques, a bondage to diligence, a bondage to failure. That's why I gave up on making biscuits from scratch. Or brownies. Or corn bread. Or even pancakes, from scratch. Yet the memory of a joke, that is my dream concept of the chipotle brownies beckoned, even haunted me. I haven't baked during my free time in over two years. Occasionally I would bake deserts, biscuits, corn breads, and such at the assisted living where i work, but always from a box. It is such a banal act, completed as mere tasks and done without any passion whatsoever.

One prosaic sunday afternoon at work, i had to bake brownies for the residents as a desert after their meal of bratwursts, green beans and stuffing. I was cutting the brownies after they cooled down then I began removing them onto serving plates. There was a mess of crumbles, gooey chocolate and crusty edges left over on the pan. The residents were then still eating their meal and i decided to catch a break for myself. With my bare fingers i scraped the remains of the brownies and stuffed them into my mouth, suddenly the memories of my mother's perfect brownies came to possess the mediocre hershey box brownies i was actually eating. The cream that rises to the top of an extremely pleasurable memory can in fact infuse with and improve upon the mundane flavors of the actual food you're eating, even just for an fleeting instant. The occurrence doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it is powerful. Beware of it's peril

To wash the richness away from my mouth, i poured myself a tall glass of milk. Afterwards, i felt a nagging guilt that arose from biting, chewing and gnawing on my own sweet, yet stale nostalgia in the form of sugar and empty calories. I regretted constantly succumbing to the satan of mental auto-cannibalism where incomprehensible longing suddenly becomes a ravaging hunger that i must desperately and immediately satisfy. The beast requires nothing except that i savagely chow down any memories of pleasure that happens to be around.
That night i only ate more brownies, ice cream and milk for dinner. As a result i suffered from a sharp headache. A very unnecessary headache. For a very necessary indulgence.

Whenever i give in to my indulgence I thought about the image of myself when I was an ugly and obese baby. I must have weighed in about 30 pounds when i was only 6 months old. My hair was sparse and I never smiled in my baby pictures, my fat cheeks spilled over my jaw line making me look like an angry mythical frog. My mom said i was addicted to her milk. I asked her how she weaned me. She said i was sent away to live with my aunt in central java for a few months. Yet it still did not erase my addiction to her breasts. She then took a drastic measure of applying chillie paste around her nipples every time i had the urge to feed on her. The spicy paste burned her delicate skin around her nipples, yet i was still persistent. The combination proved to be a painful one. She claimed she was left with scars from the chillies and my bites. Yet somehow i was eventually weaned.

I wonder if that process of weaning had anything to do with my predilection for spicy food, chillies and self-flagelation. I constantly dismiss the affinity for spicy food and chillies as a cultural and social product. I grew up in a country with spicy foods, was raised by parents who fed me spicy food, i therefore inevitably would tolerate, if not 'like', spicy food. Simple explanation. As with self-flegelation, i'd also like to dismiss that as a universally human characteristic owing to the simple need for simple survival: We must go through life experiencing some degrees of pain, therefore intentional affliction of pain onto oneself is merely a case of "practice makes perfect." The weaning, however continues to fascinate me. The chillie paste on a mother's tits. The passing down of knowledge of self-denial. The denial of the body, the stuff that makes the religion. The spicy brownies laced with chillies. The denial of pleasures that eventually morphs into a ghost of pleasure itself.

And all I needed was nothing more than a pack of brownie mix and 2 dried habanero and 4 ancho chillies (re-hydrated, finely chopped, seeds and all), a third cup of water, a third cup of vegetable oil, an egg, a dash of bittersweet chocolate chips, one table spoon or two of honey, a few sprinkles of cinnamon for good measure and because of high elevation: two extra table spoons of water and a quarter cup of flour. 50 minutes in a 325 degrees Fahrenheit oven. Cool for one hour. Done.

For a second i was having a Rick-Bayless:-mexico-one-plate-at-the-time moment. A delusion that i was at a threshold of a cultural break through. For a fleeting moment I was proud. I wanted to update my facebook status and send a mass text that reads: I INVENTED THE SPICY CHIPOTLE BROWNIE, but i didn't, I was too afraid. "Spicy Chipotle" being the new fast-food/white-wash buzz word of "flavorful mexican" that traps those exotic words in an even more exotic paradox: Meaning nothing of what's actually being uttered in its original language, while simultaneously creating a new bastard, baseless definition of the words in a new bastard, baseless language. When tasted, this spicy (and i mean, spicy! i could put less habanero next time) chipotle brownie also seems to birth its own world of paradox: tasting like a puzzle of flavors that doesn't seem to fit, yet it may fulfill the promise of coherence if perfected with time, but the very coherence would mark the destruction of its very essence.

Given the spicyness, i began to eat it a-la-mode. It was my lunch and dinner on a hot wednesday afternoon (wednesday is my saturday since i work through the weekend). I welcomed the stomachache and the headache that quickly greeted me with a couple of cigarets. Looking over my balcony into downtown skyscrapers while smoking seemed trite, I know. Still, as a man i wanted to feel and appear triumphant, because i achieved my goal. I smelled my dream coming true. It smelled like chocolate and chillies. Soon, maybe very soon, everything I wanted would arrive.

I wondered whether i should call my mom to ask her how she's doing. I haven't spoken with her in weeks. I didn't want to know about the failed immigration case, or her downsized job, or the apartment payments, or my bratty little siblings, or my father. I would beg her to only give me lies and tell me about the delicious food she's been cooking and how she wanted to share them with me. I would promise not to mention, in my broken indonesian, my longing for a lost love, or my failed ok-cupid dates, or my anonymous sex with equally lonely men on craigslist, or my useless activism, or my nagging old people at the home. I would promise not to mention my ridiculous attempt to feel fulfilled through harvesting crops at the CSA, or even worse, through writing. No, I wouldn't mention any of that. I just wanna mention that i made this spicy brownie. I hoped she would chuckle.

Toilet/Ocean

When I stare into the toilet bowl, I see the ocean
I would swim in the dark with my soul embedded into my feces.
I'd swim through all the winding chutes and tunnels
full of leaves and dead spiders
empty bags of cheetos and run-offs of gasoline
lawn clippings and morning sickness
funeral tissues and drunken pisses

through the coronado i'd be reborn into the deep-blue vastness of the pacific ocean, where the sun would levitate me and the wind would tell me where to go.

Over the island of Hawaii i'd provide shelter for some naked middle age chubby white guy from pennsylvania lounging at a modest resort. In an attempt to escape a painful divorce (and also a numbing cubicle work), he is drinking his third pina colada. His pasty skin's been roasting from the U-V radiation, now it is deep red. In keeping with the "hawaiian" theme he purchased a can of "Miss Akeneki's freshly roasted macadamia nuts with sea-salt". He's been scarfing down the nuts by obscene handfuls along the side of the hotel swimming pool. He tips the can and plops the remainder of the nuts straight into his mouth, cookie monster style.
He briefly stared into the can's artwork of a cartoon hula girl with big enthusiastic eyes, chocolate skin, a purple flower on her left ear, and her palms glued together facing the sky, giving an offering of gleaming macadamias that resemble pearls.

With his bare left hand, he crushes the can made out of cardboard and flimsy aluminum.

Just like the scrawny philipino prep cook crushing the coconut for his pina colada.
Or the fijian lady bartender crushing the ice to make his margarita,
or her shy faggy son being crushed at a game of dodgeball in school
or the U.S atomic bomb crushing the atolls in the bikini islands
or the indonesian military crushing student protesters with their American funded war tanks

Even up in the quite heavens war is inescapable
An eternal tug of war between the cold and warm wind
Where one lets go and the other one flies across an entire ocean with the same velocity as an unmanned missile
Where a violent rainstorm causes equal destruction as a thousand flame throwers

But i'd rather be a raindrop than a water canon's rush.

I wanna free fall onto jakarta, the city of my childhood, as part of an august afternoon storm.

I wanna flood the open sewage lines where it would spill onto the neighborhood streets. Where the poor public school kids wearing their red batik uniform would frolic in the shallow soupy puddle, playing together with the street kids with sticky hairs wearing dingy oversized shirts that say "Nike," "New York City," "Santa Fe," "Chevron," "Conoco...."

Their complete, in-tact, agile young bodies twirling and kicking in a rare state of euphoria in the midst of a gentle cleansing storm. Ignoring that some of their noses have to sniff glue tonight to stay warm, some of their throats must scream to sell newspapers and candies in the morning, some of their dirty hands have to wipe windshields during traffic jams and some of their legs must stand to tend their parents shops... But such punishing, compulsory and routine bodily functions exist to be denied, to be resisted, or to be simply forgotten.

at this moment those innocent and pure mounds of sentient flesh must sing, must giggle, must kick, must breath, must exhale.

Nevermind that one of them, named Siti,
an eleven year old girl,
A girl who goes to public school,
Who loves math, history and poetry,
Or who simply loves the feeling of papers, rough but slippery, running through her fingers
a daughter of a vegetable cart lady
a cook and a caregiver for her two younger brothers,

Nevermind that siti
would later that night catch typhoid,
she would catch a fever so high she'd see a bidadari.
An angel.
A fever so high, the angel would take her to heaven.
Never to bring her back.

Nevermind that a hard life of bone-breaking physical labor and romantic disappointments would've awaited her otherwise.

But i'm not the one swimming in the ciliwung river...
the often flammable river in jakarta, where factories dump their toxic wastes while their workers are living, bathing, tooth-brushing right along side it
Where they dream that landfills would become rice paddies, their stacked cardboard houses would become a warm bamboo hut in the midst of endless trees, the smell of their burning trash would become the smell of ripe mangoes...

I am no longer swimming in the sea...
I can no longer recall the sensation

I am right here, where you are.

To the east of me a sea of starving-looking grass
reflecting the same loneliness of an endless ocean

To the the west of me the formidable icy mountains that continue to function as prison bars

The river no longer reaches the ocean...
steal pipes, upon steal pipes, upon steal pipes recirculate, refilter, remedicate all the filthy water I taint. Leaving the wet, the stinky, the unwanted out to dry. Where the wind would carry the stench and the germs back to my nose.

The pureness of spring water that comes out of the thick lips of the earth cools down dirty coals. Spring water mixed with high-fructose corn syrup becomes abundant fuels for night shift border patrols. It becomes scarce fuels for fatigued beings who must migrate. It becomes fuels for bright neon lights shaped like cowboy hats, pink flamingos, multi-color circus tents.

Without mercy. Without choice. It becomes stuck in a dam.

Like the shower water running off my back being dammed by the hands of my lover.

Like his cum being dammed by the cavity of my throat. or by the cavity of my aching anus.

Some waters we wish to keep and contain.
but all waters have got to move.

Whether in a slow stillness of a lake or in a raging rapid.

Whether in a subtle evaporation of a warm sweat after an orgasm,

Or in a violent tempest of saliva swishing between tongues and lips.

All water's got to move

whether through a retired army general in a tuxedo sipping fine wine at the opera
or around a homeless vietnam veteran eating a road-kill carcass of a cat in a middle of a cold rain.

All water's got to move

Mima (part 1)

After she woke up at six in the morning,

She witnessed the sun rising.

She picked up the daily paper she never reads.

She propped open her gracefully wrinkled eyes with a heavily sweetened lipton tea.

She read her daily bible verse and watched the old shouting white-guy on TV.

She walked through a dimly lit hallway to the bathroom and witnessed another brown ring around the toilet bowl, around the bathtub, around the sink. This one has a lighter tint than yesterday. She then scrubbed them with sharp chemicals that stung so deeply in her nose, she thought she smelled blood.

As a seasoned weightlifter of the mundane routine, she prepared the medications for the residents exactly how she's been conducting the routine for years. Even the constant changes in the medications, or changes in the residency of the house, no longer excited her. They have long seeped into her clockwork mind.

She steadfastly followed the day's menu. She scanned the fridge and the pantries to find the ingredients. Some things needed to be thawed, some cut, some mixed, some fried, some baked, some microwaved, all served. Then inevitably some got thrown out into the trash.

She witnessed the sun sinking. She wished, as if she was blowing a birthday candle, for one day where she'll get to rest at night without the violent threat of monotony of labor.

She was sitting up on the bed with her back, neck and head resting on a pillow she propped up against the head board.

She realized the presence of her resilient, but deeply worn back.

Worn after countless acts of bending down.

To pick up the lints off the carpet.

To pick up the spilling trash off the bin.

A slice of onion that jumped off the cutting board.

A pill that fell on the floor. That she then blew a puff of air, then kissed to god.

The daily paper off the drive way.

Wet laundry load off the washer, that she then moved to the dryer.

Dry laundry load off the dryer, that she folded then handed to a resident.

Strand of hair off the bathtub drain.

She attempted to silence her noisy mind, so she put on the Elvis gospel CD into the boombox,

She picked up her leather cased bible, then read another verse.

She got on her feet while still wearing her work uniform of green flip-flops and grey scrubs with yellow trims.

she walked to the shower in the bathroom adjoining her bedroom. Her pace became slower when she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror.

She sighed. Out of relieve or out of exhaustion, she could no longer tell the difference.

She approached the mirror slowly so not to spook her own reflection. She tilted up her face slightly then brought it closer to the mirror. She began a dialog with her wrinkles. She wanted to ask them if the promise of the over-priced olay-regenerist cream held true. She checked how her roots are doing to see if they needed dying.

The fact that people (of any kind: indonesian, white, black, young, old) constantly underestimate her real age and mistake her grandchildren as her children always cushioned her worries of aging.

However in this strange land where she's always forced to toil her labor even in her old age, there are always worries about dying vainly. In this strange land.

One of her favorite nightmare scenario is dying from a heart attack while cooking green bean casserole. A dish she hates because she's always forced to over cook her favorite vegetable to the point of mush.

Something was out of place with her insides. She felt the sudden urge to take a shit, an activity she usually regulated in the morning, but never this late at night. She started to pull down her grey cotton-poly blend draw-string pants (and soon the rest of her clothes) for the purpose of washing her self down in the shower.

But the urge was becoming stronger and stronger. She had to comply. While her pants still tied themselves around her ankle, she wobbled in three or four rushed steps flopping her feet against her flip flops that inadvertently resulted in a pleasing percussive sound. Like a drum fill-in to a chorus, a transition. She quickly pulled down her champagne color laced panties. Then, a small explosion.

She continued to sit on the toilet quietly lip-synching "bring me closer to thee" by elvis. She wanted to wait to find out if her bowel aberration was finished. It felt like it had. She checked for the tenderness in her stomach to question if everything was alright. After all, her body is her last refuge. Especially her insides.

After decades of deliberately selecting what goes in and what doesn't,

After long accepting her lost youth and beauty,

After long accepting that in life there's too many malevolent forces that would permanently ruin the suppleness of her once perfect face and skin,

The only pillow she took comfort in is the fact that she always and still was able to manage her heartbeat through deep breathing.

She could still confidently clench her vaginal muscles to stop the flow of urine.

And she could keep a tight schedule of her bowel movement.

Right this moment, Something was out of place.

After a painfully ordinary day, and an ordinary routine of bodily functions.

This she did not expect.

(to be continued)

First Time Cross-Dressing

I felt truly powerful the first time i donned heels and a dress in public. Sashaying down the street, i recognized the presence of my hips and my butt, the very central part of my body i never knew i had. It was something of a fantasy of mine to have a bright color fabric draped around my waist and down past my knees, to create a wind when i'm walking while the breeze is blowing between my thighs and past my balls. I felt like superman flying through the air with my bright orange skirt as my power cape.That day during pride, i realized how much i cherished and relished in the awkward stares of yuppie mothers, suburban passerby's, muscly boys, fat men and just about everyone else. That pride would soon end while i was dancing under the scorching sun, squeezed in between suffocating breathes. My bright orange dress suddenly became a dull and heavy armor. I stripped it off and what's left is a scrawny, dark body amongst a sea of brawny white bodies. On that dance floor, the lights were reflecting only on their own pasty skins, creating blindness. And i, who's in the midst of it all, disappeared. Without my bright orange dress i'm invisible. And how can anyone see, let alone dance with the unseen?