easter: altered by one letter, 'easier' ...

Family is funny, especially distant family. Literally distant means you haven't necessarily grown up next to one another, but rather been privy to intermittent annual check-ins: you may need charts to remember last names and parents, but you'll be able to say with a truthful confidence "Girrrrrrrrrl, you've gotten TALLLLL!" We are black people. This is also important.

We talk about weather, un-ironically: "We even got snow here, boy!" "We were trapped inside for THREE DAYS!" We don't necessarily scramble or dig for juicy conversation. It's comfortable enough to guess about things ("You're a musician, right? Do you know ________? He was a musician, too!") and sometimes tell stories about the olden days; Old folks, or babies. Hilarious reckless teenager stories. Politics is glazed over like a good donut -- something could be bad or good or trifling but would surely murder dinner if dwelled upon.

I think it's the most morbid combination of self-ease and hyper-outsiderness. I can be myself, and weird, without fear of people judging me -- but at the same time, the barrier of distance and time makes intimacy almost a futile exercise. There always seem to be people you like the best mixed in with a wider swath of crazy country relatives, and that's so, but liking them just makes me sad I've missed out on large parts of important lives. There are unspoken, repeated, rules of conversation and cooing and even dialect. I say 'y'all' here, to fit in. Making people in large groups laugh feels like a victory, even though it's easy.

We eat crawfish. They arrive alive, and flail helplessly around in net bags. I don't let this make me sad: they are poured into a pot of boiling water and spaces and then we eat dozens and dozens of messy crustaceans. We realize silence or other people, closer people, having more familiar interactions near by. Keep eating. It's delicious.

Dad and Mom make me on edge here. My mom comes to Texas and refuses to have fun. Dad comes and wants to be back in college, but maybe his college friends here, still similar, make him sad. They fret together about an imminent unaddressed future of moving back to this neighborhood. My brother is taught how to fish, to shoot a gun, to drive a four-wheeler, and because he is fourteen this cannot be understood as a deep family betrayal. They simmer in old juice, like our dinner. If my heart and neuroses were not "millions" of miles away from here in NYC, I would be having a deep identity crisis. As is, I can't help peering into this glimpse of their inner married life with the same judgmental frustration my mother targets at her mother. I cannot see myself as them. I love them a lot.

There aren't a lot of exclamation points to be found here. The world is flat and stale. Texas has just passed a bill where the public school textbooks are now able to OMIT SLAVERY, and pick up somewhere around World War I. I wonder if you can feel the idea of this "essay" radiating towards you without working too hard intellectually.