Ordinary

I am just ordinary. I am ordinary. Oar-duh-NAE-ree. The tongue carresses the roof of the mouth not once, not twice, but three times, each different, a tap, a touch, a brush. Ordinary. I am.

Gliding across the landscape on my road bike, the sun on the road above the freeway by the hills through the trees, it was so hard to believe.

"我們是普通人. We are ordinary people. What makes you think you're so special?" my mom had asked, as I sat there, trying, trying to explain all my half-baked plans, of salmon packing in Alaska, barback-ing in Ireland, sheep-shearing in New Zealand, pearl oyster diving in French Polynesia, waitressing in Hawaii, cycling across the US mainland, organic farming in Israel, au-pairing in France, menial-job-working and starved-artist-living in Portland. And then I'd come back and write about it, I told her. I'll write all about it and get my degree.

I am not ordinary, I tried to explain. 我不是普通的人! I am special! I am loved! I am seen and known by an all-seeing, all-knowing God! We are ALL special! None of us is ordinary! I need to go! To do! To see! (But there is an unmistakable note of hysteria in the series of declarations, each exclamation mark the echo of a plaintive wail.) I don't want a life rife with middle-class comfort, overflowing with a luxury that is not deserved decadence but merely insatiable materialism. That is not the life I want to lead; I would rather die. I tried to explain.

I said to my Dad, "I see you go to work every day, and I know you hate your boss, and you're always tired, and you've never started your own company like you wanted to, and I just know that if I ever end up like that, it would be so sad. I would be so sad. 我不能變成像那樣. I can't become like that." I might as well have said, "like you."

It was a terrible thing to say, but I did not realize it at the time. I could not think at the time, because all I knew was that I wanted so much, I was hungering for so much, and I could not articulate the intensity of the call. How could I not but respond? How do you explain the siren's song to someone who has never heard it before?

"You know what makes me sad?" he had asked in anger, "Seeing you like that." I had been in tears, a pile of soiled tissues on the floor beside me.

Peddling through the Oakland hills, I began to think that I would very much love to keep cycling every day, for very many days, riding away from the conversations I did not want to have, away from the insecurities that I could not face, that perhaps I would indeed like to bike 1300 miles from Vancouver back to the Bay Area this summer.

I hurried back to campus for 4:20, pushing an uncomfortable cadence for the number of turns and steepness of the grade in the road, and walked to the Glade barefoot, feeling the warmth of the asphalt as it patted my feet--the rhythmic pitter-patter seemed to say, "You're all right, you're all right." Sitting on the lawn with WR, his friends T^2, and AW, I sank into the stupor of sunshine and smoke.

AW returned later that night, with the same responsibility high that I ordinarily got from talking with my family (it must be a cultural, normalizing force, unknowable and invisible but powerful); he would enroll in school in the fall, he would not go off to Ireland, or anywhere for that matter, and he said, "We," and here he gestured at the both of us, "are very immature, I decided."

I was too proud to agree then, but of course he is right. I don't want to be turning 21 in a month and a half when I am really still only 12 on the inside.