Where did I get them?

Knowing doesn't always matter.  Where the bugs came from exactly, when they arrived, is immaterial.  Is history.

What I do want to know is, where did I get these things -- and by these things I mean both this, that tendency to have been driven to near madness over them, and that, the endurance to do whatever was necessary to kill them off -- and even if, yes, it meant losing both my mind and ten percent of my body weight in the process.

Of my parents' four children, I'm the one who looks like my mother.  My father of all people would have known, and this was one of the last -- one of the only -- things he ever said to me before dying.

My mother...a haunted person.  And all my life, I, in turn, have been haunted, always, by her.  It's not a criticism.  It just is.

But there's more.  I've always felt that it's from my father that I inherit my strong body, compact, wiry.  And maybe, just maybe, it's from this same thrice-married man -- this man who had a fondness for cigarettes and alcohol -- that I get this persistence, this unrelenting hunger. He has been, for me, a last name,  a word in English -- one that says I come from ordinary people who worked with their hands.  It all starts to make sense.


Where do you come from?

Sometimes it seems like everyone in New York has an interesting, yet easy, answer to that question.  A story of immigration eventually told by rote.  And so, for many of us originally from nondescript American families -- in nondescript American cities -- it feels, sometimes, as though we came from nowhere.  My curiosity to know more -- to have a story --  gets me nowhere.  Not with one parent dead.  Not with the other one not talking.

But this much I do know, and maybe it's sufficient for now:  my hair springs up into perfect ringlets -- curls  that come from my father.  My hair is, simultaneously, perfectly straight -- and that comes from my mother. 

But what about me?

Me? I come from myself. Or I come from nowhere. Or everywhere, simultaneously.  From a lack of compromise.  From conflict. 

I am from both confusion and determination.