jennfrank.

saṃsāra (time after time)

Yesterday my best friend was worrying about her son's sensory-processing disorder out loud to me. As a baby he'd struggled with apraxia of speech. So she and her son used to communicate by signing language with their hands, which I'd always thought was just incredible. I used to watch them in the Chili's absolutely thunderstruck by their silent, effortless communication.

I'd also always kept the thought but don't all babies struggle with apraxia to myself; I guess I've never had a clear sense of when it's time to start worrying about someone, whether it's too early or too late. Mothers know when, or at least they know to worry at all.

So I remember that very clearly, but I also remember the day my best friend's son looked at me and whispered, "Hey, Auntie Jen, would you pick me up so I can reach the pool table."

And I looked at my best friend's son stunned because it was the first time he had ever spoken aloud to me, and his test run at communication was a complete and whole sentence, with a greeting, followed by a plea, and then punctuated with a clear stated goal—because his request for assistance was so important to him in that moment, it allowed him to get over the stage fright of speaking English as a sort of second language. He had put the fragments together and discovered grammar.

And I just nodded wordlessly and picked him up and let him fuck around with the billiards balls and, when his weight had started to become too much for my spaghetti-noodle arm-cradle, I'd put him on a chair instead. ("Jenny? Why is my son up on a chair?" "Oh, uh, because he told me, uh... I'm sorry, you're right, I guess I should not have put him on the chair," I said. "Sorry," I whispered to him, too, removing him from the chair.)

"I know my son is brilliant," my best childhood friend was telling me yesterday, "but I do worry about how he'll do on tests."

Oh, don't worry about it so much, I'd laughed. Here, I'll tell you. My [adoptive mom] was a wonderful guidance counselor; let me channel her for you for a second. First off, she would assure you that kids learn to be good test-takers. It's just another skill they learn, or should learn. There are classes where you learn how to take tests, like when to make a guess or when to skip a question. And she'd tell kids to take the.... Did you take the ACTs or the SATs?

"I did better on the ACTs."

Ugh, of course you did. She'd say to take, either the ACTs or SATs, whichever you prefer, as many times as you can afford. Infinity times, if you can. So that there won't be any sense of stress associated, so the kids can just relax and take the test without worrying, since they'll believe they already have an opportunity to take it again. Just keep signing up for the next one—if you can afford it. No, not everyone can do this. Which is why, if kids had a rough time with a standardized test, my [adoptive mom] would go to bat for them and finesse the system a little, so they could get a redo. I don't know if that's totally fair, but that's what she was really good at—getting the rules changed, getting exceptions made, even if a little bit questionable.

Then I sighed. My [adoptive mom] had made me take the SATs repeatedly, because she knew I could break 1500. But the best I ever did was 1490, and I just burned out trying.

I did get an 800 on Verbal. And one time I got a 700 on Math. I just could never get those two scores to get together. I struggled and struggled over whether to tell universities about my 800 or my 700. And either way, it still mysteriously added up to 1490—still always only 10 points shy of my [adoptive mom]'s unconditional love.

Parents, don't they, have a nasty way of tabulating their kids' worth that way. Like, it would've been fine if I'd gotten a combined total of 500. Any score should have been fine. And that score has never contributed anything of value to my life, has never really informed my options. I feel the same way about dental braces, to be honest, but she was so worried about my diastema and my one misplaced tooth and my options.

I did really well on the ACT the first time I took it, I'd told my friend. The ACT is a more accurate measure of aptitude, or so they used to say. [I'm not sure any test is a useful measure of aptitude; I'm merely reporting in from the 1990s right now.] And I was probably barely a teen, and I remember being like, okay, great score, so why am I still here? In high school? Like, can I not just leave now.

My best friend sighed, too. "Remember the Presidential Award?"

I did not, but my friend definitely did. Apparently, my high-school boyfriend came right after her in the alphabet and, when they were standing side-by-side to receive their awards one-by-one (yes, 25 years ago, my God), he'd automatically stood up before her to receive his—had truly believed that the honor being conferred had jumped the line by one, had simply passed over her.

"He really didn't believe I was smart enough," she said emotionlessly. "He just stood up for his award, and then when they did announce my name he said, Oh. Good work, and sat back down until his own name was called."

Wowww, I said, bruuutal. I was thinking about my best friend, but I was also thinking very sadly about the wound my high school boyfriend's own embarrassment must've made on his underdeveloped teenage brain.

"I didn't like him," she said.

I'm sorry, I didn't know that, I said.

"Oh yes you did," she said. "I told you several times. He was very mean to me."

Okay, haha, listen. He only liked me because we got the exact same PSAT score, I told her. That's why he first asked me out. And you know why I liked him back, I said.

"Uhh," she said. "You liked the music he listened to?"

Oh! Yeah, that was true, too. It was true that we sang in his mom's Saturn on the way to 8pm minigolf—yes, that was absolutely part of it. But it was really because he used to write me letters, and poems and little odes. His favorite pen was a blue Bic Rollerball, and he had this tiny, tidy penmanship that made college-ruled lines look full-sized and capacious. He was naming the world for me. He'd pass these notes to me in the hall really fast, always averting his eyes. Like a spy making a live drop.

And the letters were never folded into a paper football or a fortune-telling salt cellar, but into thirds, and dated at the top, like a proper letter, like a little old man was writing to me. His favorite color was beige, the poor child.

The first time he asked me if I loved him, I'd sighed. I love you like a 15-year old would love you, I'd replied, extremely annoyed. Oh boy, I hope he doesn't read my diaries anymore. I hope he's left that old habit behind.

He used to read my online diary, I said out loud to my best friend. For many years, I think. And one day someone anonymously left the rudest comment about you and me. On Livejournal. And I just immediately suspected. So I think maybe he didn't like you, either—just jealousy, I think.

"Jealousy?" she laughed.

Yep. I think he thought of you as the obstacle, as the reason I did not want to marry him when, in actuality I was the obstacle to marrying him.

One time, one of the other guidance counselors, probably [woman with an outlandishly memorable Cajun name], went running into my [adoptive mom]'s office with [my high school boyfriend]'s essay for, oh... oh... ah, National Merit Scholar, that was it. He'd listed out all his dreams for the rest of his life—where he wanted to live, who he wanted to be—and then, that he was planning to marry his high school sweetheart. And [memorable lady] ran into the office waving his essay in the air and she shouted at my [adoptive mom], Did you know about this?

And [my adoptive mom], in turn, furiously confronted me and said did you know about this? No. No, I did not.

I never knew if he really meant what he wrote, or if it was just a thing he was saying because it sounded nice in an essay, but it scared the everfucking shit out of me. I decided to use college as my high-school relationship's exit strategy, and he'd already intuited that's what I'd planned to do and confronted me about it, and I guess it was pretty obvious because I'd been breaking up with him for the entire three years.

But I was terrified that if I didn't get away using the only resource a kid with a 1490 and no sense of privacy or autonomy or boundaries has—which is geographical distance and getting very far away—I would end up married by complete accident, the way girls in Texas do, before my life ever had been granted its chance to begin.

It isn't really about gender or comp-het anymore, although I've certainly pile-driven these thoughts into myself; it's about the fact that I always knew I'd spin myself right off the Earth's surface if someone weren't there to ground me. But some people's definition of "grounding" is shutting you up in your bedroom and locking the door and telling you to not come out again until you've learned your lesson, and the lesson is just a tautological one, which is that someone will always be looking to shut you up. For your safety; for everyone's good.

I think what I really desire is to just move through a space safely and autonomously and with what my friend Em calls "that good blood," and that joie de vivre, without having this sense of something—and it's really always the same thing, isn't it, quantum-leaping around like a total fucking horror movie—grabbing and snatching at my hem like so much static cling.

Sometimes I think Cyndi Lauper is just girlypop William Shakespeare—a little star who just laughs and laughs at everything, which is the right way to play your hand I think. Maybe her father is right and she's got no common sense, and maybe she'll come to believe it herself, but maybe at some point she'll find her father's keyring, and that's the night she'll start playing dumb just as an amusing gag.

I'm still working on my own sense of a personal cosmology, for sure—as are we all, to varying degrees. The process has been a little messy (or at times a lot messy) and, often, reactive or misguided. I am finally beginning to appreciate it isn't something I can accomplish for myself in a total vacuum. Now, I have been reading a lot about Logos—"word," "meaning," because words do still have meanings lmaooo—and its counterpart Eros, if you're brushing up on Jung. (I'd always stayed away from reading too deep into Jung because of a highly inbuilt and reactionary "ope, smells like false binary" but, hey, turns out we are each meant to individuate and to contain both, ha ha ha I need more therapy.)

But I think when you look at who is perpetrating fascism, you're gonna notice babble and meaninglessness and senselessness, and a sort of seductive but ultimately corrosive nihilism—a mental health crisis, in other words—and ha ha ha we all need so much therapy.

One time, on ketamine—not in a party setting, I hope to make clear, but in a clinic and on a drip because maybe you can cure PTSD or prolonged grief or physical pain that way—I wondered to myself about the nature of good versus evil. Or rather, I wondered how sure I could be that I knew the difference, because I have always felt pretty gaslit about extremely basic stuff I'd always thought I was born knowing for sure.

And immediately what came to mind was one of those meme charts, with an x-axis and a y-axis, and all the little points plotted out along two different continuums—a reimagining of almost every possible philosophy as something that can be printed on 2D space that has been divided into quads.

Yes, that seems right, I'd thought to myself, it's four, not two.

"There are too many people in this [relationship]," I used to sigh—just everyone's opinions mattering a little too much. But at some point I finally said "I think I was wrong; there are only four people in this [relationship], two of you and two of me, and I think it still might be two too many."

And I think a lot about the brain and the heart, and how they're divided into fourths, not two (or maybe I'm just really, really bad at human anatomy, or at visualizing volumetric space in three dimensions, and it's probably way more than four), but lately—

lately it really just feels like we are all being, not only divided, but drawn and quartered.