love in a box. (or, why internet sisters are a real and true and good thing.)

i like to chronicle good things.

even when my heart has sprouted wings and is fluttering a good few inches just out of my reach, so that i spend the whole day glorious-giddy and unsure whether or not i want to snag it back from the lovely perch it's found, cradled by air and good news and something far lighter and brighter than sunshine.

the truth is, right now, it is very hard to remember the good things. the good people. the moments when the reason you cannot sleep is because you opened a box of love and magic and unexpected care and not because your stomach is twisted with knots and news headlines form a dark halo around your thoughts and it will be morning soon but you cannot rest, you cannot quiet, you cannot let yourself loosen.

i was in disbelief from the moment i first opened this.

and, always, it is very hard to acknowledge that people see good in you, that people like you and think about you when you hardly expect them to - that people you admire, very far away, will write a solid, beautifully inked letter about how highly they think of you (even that they know who you are!).

one letter, among so many other, unexpected, unthought of, letters. deep in a box of love and magic and well wishes.

i do not know, still, after a night of happy tears and individual thanks and unending gratitude, what to say. i know that the (dubiously big) sister of my heart, nicole brinkley, is worth more than anything i could parse out, anything that i have told her with shaking fingers and blurry eyes. what she has wrought here, for my sake - i cannot ever pay her back for it. she gathered together faith and determination and expended it all for me, over several months.

there are good people. and there are nicoles. would we all be like her.

i know who will get tight, bone-rattling hugs the next time our paths cross, who i will not be able to speak to properly until i've found some manner of repaying this kindness, some manner of saying how wonderfully, how deeply this touched me and how much it meant to me.

the truth is, right now, it is very hard to remember there are good things. i've scrambled over the hard floorboards of my bedroom five times this morning, to touch this box and marvel at its existence, at the fact that night has receded and washed forward once more and it is still here, a concrete presence filled to the brim and not at all a dream.

nope. still here.

thank you.

thank you from the bottom of my heart.

thank you for letting me chronicle something good, something hopeful, something that fills my heart and my eyes up every time i think about it. thank you for giving me something to anchor me when i feel low, when my words feel empty or useless or deflated.

you are what is good in the world. and i am glad to know you, and i am glad to love you, and i am glad to know that you know me and you see the good in me and you love me.

i will never, ever forget this.

[Diversify!] - Marginalized Villains, You, Me, and Microaggressions.

You have set a pair of iron shoes in front of me.

This is not a fairy tale. I am not your resentful, salt-cheeked stepdaughter. I am not a prisoner of circumstance and squandered riches. And yet, you set a pair of iron shoes before me, snaggle-tooth nails leering from the forbidding seams, still stained with the last victim's blood and tears and insurmountable pain.

They are not my shoes. You say that they are not, do not take this personally. They belong to someone else: someone neither of us has seen, except in mere fluttery flashes of their being wandering by, moving like air or dust motes out of my grasp before I can grasp them by the collar, shake out their sins from between their clenched teeth, force their feet in the shoes you have created so kindly, so thoughtfully, for them to dance in so that my own small, nervous toes will not be punished by proxy.

It is because I look enough like them, or what you know of them, what you expect of them. That is what you say, do not take this personally. You have seen their eyes, their skin, their teeth, and cobbled them together into a beast of your own creation. You present this portrait to me as I inch back from the hateful shoes, the unwanted manacles, pointing out the resemblances in my brow, my last name, my faith.

They are my shoes now, because you are insisting that they are, they must be so.

And yet, I will not step forward to be shod and shredded down into submission.

Stereotypes are painful, horrible things. They masquerade as justifiable logic, reasonable generalization, practical and pragmatic constructs that you unfold like cardboard boxes and stack your expectations of other people in, so you can unpack them when desired and force them to chew and swallow, smiling at you pleasantly (they must smile pleasantly, always, when you dissect them by what you've heard in the news or what you've read in your latest novel, or what your grandmother told you about people like Them).

Some are more easily identifiable than others. They have been washed and worn and their threads have faded out. They sneak about and jump back into the shadows when we point an accusatory finger in their directions. We tug them away from the shoulders of our friends, toss them down on the ground and break them down to their base substances: envy, prejudice, sheer ignorance, hate.

The presence of the marginalized villain, though, is one that continues to be perpetuated. It is reasonable, I am told, do not take it personally. People like you are not people like us. People like you, even if you insist, you prove, you close your eyes and scream into the masses that they are not at all like you, are bad people.

Every group of people has bad people. But how many other bad people do you see who are not brown-skinned, have a certain shape in their eye or tilt to their nose or accent to their voice? How many bad people do you see that fit that iron shoe, continuously, constantly: who fall into outdated, ludicrous tropes, wear down their daughters to rag and bone?

Every group of people has bad people. That is what you tell me, do not take it personally, when you insist, you protest, you beg to be allowed just one villain in your story line that is based off horrific, skewed, easily identifiable stereotypes of people like me. Every group of people has bad people.

You are not special.

You are not singled out.

You should sit down. Be silent. Just wear the shoe that doesn't fit you, that cramps you, that confines you, that isn't who you are.

Here is what you need to hear. Here is what you need to know.

No. This is not my shoe to wear. Not because you say, not because you assume I will happily chew and choke down your kind "reclaiming," "unpacking", "nuanced" representation of an already tired presence in every story you claim features and stars me.

This is not my shoe to wear. This is not my pockmarked, dark soul you attempt to pin to my back. This is not the microaggression you try to shape and mold me to accept, to swallow down every time: "violent," "disloyal", "hateful," "angry," not like us, not like us, not like us.

Marginalized presences as villains, each and every time, do nothing to our progress. It does nothing for my voice, for me, to open another novel, another perceived harbor of comfort, to have the gates drawn in my face by the shrouded, veiled figure or desert dweller or backwards immigrant parent tethering their child to the window sill where they can sing their songs to the sympathetic world spread beneath them and get fresh air and stay where they are, wither away where they are.

This is not my shoe to wear. I will not believe my foot is fitted to it, that you do me a favor by creating it, that it is nothing personal to assume I will wear it, that I will understand it, that I will gladly pay money and choke it down and swallow it (always with a smile, no offense taken, that is the way things are, that is the way we are) when it is presented to me on a plate.

I am saving my feet, treating them tenderly, for the soft, silken slippers they are meant to wear: the truth that my tongue will savor, will slide down my throat with a gentleness, a soft surety that this is right, this is who I am, this is my soul and my shoe to wear and I am pleased with it.

How The Mailman Delivered Happiness...

This was my first year participating in The Broke and Bookish Winter Gift Exchange! I was a bit nervous as to how it would go (seeing as a) I don't celebrate Christmas and b) oooh, the mailman just pulled off without leaving anything in there! Travesty!) but it turns out all my worries/nail biting/compulsive glances upward at the sky to see if a certain sled was flying overhead...ahem...led to an incredible package from

Britney! (a.k.a. BookishBriti @ I Eat Words)

which contained the following goodness:

(Hardcover edition)

and

Hardcover edition...sorry the image is so small :(

and a gorgeous bookmark with "K" for...well...Kaye! (not shown because I couldn't get the camera to work for me today)

Thanks so much for the gifts, Britney! <3