To set the mood, please listen to this before reading: https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/track\/4wbDALtjwuwBxtMgjuumoi?si=5e3fa87c36e44389<\/p>\n
Sometimes I wonder if she\u2019d like me. I know she\u2019d love me, but I don\u2019t know if she\u2019d like me. I like her though. I didn\u2019t like her when I knew her, but I like her now. Her hair, blonde on her head, brown on her arms, black on her\u2026 that part. I like how she opened that part up for people, she wanted to share it, to share herself. She wanted to bloom and I like that about her, her desire, her longing. I wonder if she\u2019d like me now. If she\u2019d look at me and see a cereus in bloom, or if she\u2019d see a cereus still yet to bloom, or\u2013\u2013and this is my worst fear\u2013\u2013if she\u2019d see that I bloomed a long time ago.<\/span><\/p>\n I like how she had visions, I have visions too. Visions of her, visions of us finally reuniting. Mala and Pohpoh were \u201cone and the same\u201d (Shani Mootoo, 173) for many years before they became different. Before Pohpoh actualized her conception of Mala, before she broke free from herself and became that conception, that imagined person who always used to comfort her. What if everything is better imagined? Pohpoh felt release\u2013\u2013relief\u2013\u2013when she woke up from her dream of being Mala to find herself in Mala\u2019s body. But Mala, too, now spends her days dreaming, not wishing she could be Pohpoh, but wishing she could see her again. Wishing she could talk to her. Wishing she could smell her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Mala wishes that \u201cshe and that Pohpoh could have been two separate people\u201d (Shani Mootoo, 173) and that she could, somehow, help Pohpoh become someone else, not Mala as she is now. She wishes that \u201cthey could have been best friends, or even that she could have been the mother of Pohpoh or at least her older sister\u201d (Shani Mootoo, 173). That way Mala could still be with Pohpoh, could watch after her, and make sure that she was \u201cprotected\u201d from both her father and from herself. Pohpoh became Mala because she didn’t have Mala, or a Mala-like figure. Pohpoh conceived of Mala and put her on, like a cloak, like a sheet. But now that cloak has swallowed her, that sheet has suffocated her, and she isn\u2019t Pohpoh anymore at all. Mala lives in queer time, but Pohpoh is a time traveler.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Pohpoh bloomed at night, like a cereus. She knew she was going to bloom and she was going to bloom brilliantly, quickly, briefly. She knew her blossoming would be pungent, she knew it would repulse some people, those people who don\u2019t understand the beauty of death. The love of death. The life of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes I wonder if she killed herself a different way. Sometimes I wonder if she\u2019d like me, if she\u2019d understand that I did what she wanted me to do, I just had to go and make a stink of it. I wonder if she\u2019d think I\u2019m beautiful regardless. If her conception, actualized, was what she imagined it to be. I\u2019m afraid it isn’t, and I\u2019m afraid I\u2019ve let her down. All the pills and the smoking and the stealing and the hurting\u2013\u2013I\u2019m chasing with hedonism. I can\u2019t swallow the thought of the Unknown. But she could, and she knew the Unknown was a friend\u2013\u2013like Pohpoh knew. The Unknown was herself, a cereus, not yet in bloom, but already emanating its odor. Already past Goodbye, and past its past lives.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To set the mood, please listen to this before reading: https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/track\/4wbDALtjwuwBxtMgjuumoi?si=5e3fa87c36e44389 Sometimes I wonder if she\u2019d like me. I know she\u2019d love me, but I don\u2019t know if she\u2019d like me. I like her though. I didn\u2019t like her when I knew her, but I like her now. Her hair, blonde on her head, brown … Continue reading just give me an easy life and a peaceful death<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5597,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[346812],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-class-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5597"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}