On the northern campus there’s a little tiny home that hides behind a wall of bamboo, wrapped in a white picket fence with hedges swaddling it, trussed in exotica foliage to the Georgian ecosystem. It cannot be seen from the main road and must be traveled to on foot, or so you can believe that if you make the choice to climb up the stairs on a path I dare not tread normally.. I pass it and stare at the fountain – like a toddler gurgling some disgusting puree of sweet potatoes and chicken. It stares at me and I stare at it harder. It wants me to come in, walk into the Founder’s Garden like I’m entitled to the place and see what little secrets it has to offer with the lush dewy leaves and musky scent of earth and vibrancy, but my hands rest on the iron gate; a jaw held open waiting to snap on me for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can’t go in. I shouldn’t go in. I don’t know what this place has to offer me. What it does offer me: the world in little sprites of wonder and fantasy – dancing on the third eye and drifting from the Joro spiders in their nestled webs in the holly bushes. From the Magnolias with their virgin seed clusters, plump and begging to be investigated, drifting to the flaking white paint of the windows, peering back at me with the question.
I don’t enter the garden. I’m held back by some entity who claims to be an authority in my mind, but I know they’re lying. A testing of wills, and mine the lesser as I cross the threshold and leave behind the whimsy for sun-basked asphalt and resignation.
I’m adrift in a miasma of flesh and fancy, swimming in the tides of bodies to get to where I can find safe, quiet passage. I catch myself at a little desk in the main library, but my mind is awash. Muscle-memory keeps me from drowning as I wrestle to kill the spite in my mind. Mint color Lululemons stride past my nook and it’s a distraction as I pry my eyes away, trying not to let the doubts sink in. I made it here. I’m viciously clawing my way against being a statistic and the weight of the world but all I can do is lament in this tiny desk in a deafening silence that maybe I’m wrong. My tormentor says so. It has me think about how soft those shorts must be, for their luxury and how they hold the name aloft for so long and with a resell value to make any thrifter’s wallet sing. How they fit just right, but my own body would push the boundaries, tear them at the seams with every pop and squeeze. It would perverse them for their purpose, a criminal act – or so my torturer says. I have to deny myself physical pleasures of the body and mind, for committing a sin that I have been conditioned to clutch since I was a child. They didn’t teach me how to handle it, but I gawk in awe and spite as I turn to leave my sanctuary and submerge myself into the deep of mist and sweat.
My keeper runs a tight shift. I mask with a thin smile and laughter – I can’t let it slip. I can’t let it show how badly I want to feel those shorts on myself, yet still I’m held accountable for my sins. I’m still held to impossible standards, and I dance like a puppet on the sinew of too large clothing.
“Do you guys have any iPhones?”
It wasn’t a terribly common question. We had iPhones like we had the latest Samsung Galaxies and cheap Motorolas, but Apple held their users in a vice grip that choked them for the latest announcement of the 14.
I sat her down at the simple bar top desk and looked on the work Android through the inventory. Her phone fell right in the grocery department here at Target and wouldn’t turn on anymore. She said she wanted a 13 Pro. Didn’t matter the color. That’s fine, but it still pulls up thousands of search results that I have to comb through like the troopers in Spaceballs. All we had at all was a Pro model, sixty-four gigabytes, Alpine Green. She could buy it outright, but that was over a thousand dollars and tax in Athens is eight percent. She didn’t bat an eye when I mentioned the price. No hemming and hawing like my mother and I at Publix where we count back the numbers to each other to make sure we’re under budget, and what food we’ll have to put back as a result of being a few bucks over. She even picked out a Magsafe case – another fifty dollars plus tax. It let the green shine through. Her credit card was metal and clacked when it hit the reader, and the name on it wasn’t her own.
I sat in my car in silence that night when I drove home. I was stunned in the store on the clock but after the fact too, and I wasn’t being paid for the convenience of the thoughts lingering like a fog. She paid over a thousand dollars, I hadn’t even seen a number that high on the register before, but it’s burned into my mind now, along with how exposé she had been with paying. It was not an issue for her, nor the person who paid for her, and she left happy. But I squirm through life, a victim to some falsified form of classlessness, drawn to the likeness of my father and his mother before him, hard-headed and angry with my subconscious to where I wish I could rip it free from my head, a choking vine that would rather me suffer in vile hatred than cut the rot and grow.
I cried that night into my mattress. Cool comfort coddled me like a baby with colic. I want to stop the ache, but I must wake up again. The cruel cathedral of my mind still has its authority, and with the sun I must pursue my way past haunting green gardens and lavish wealth for the affluent. I have been given no map and I am blind, but wrought-iron will is my swan song.