Ballad of the Hometown Zero
Anyone who is truly “from” anywhere knows that hometowns have their own logic. You will inherit it, to some degree, whether you like it or not.
Sometimes, this logic is a living, spirited thing with veins that act as streams of ancestral wisdom, irrigating the present so the here and now can root itself across the folds of time.
And other times, this logic moves like a blind snake, coiling eternally in darkness at the bottom of a bucket.
How this logic manifests to you is solely dependent on the extent to which it rules your world.
It’s hard for me to write because I read women like sighswoon and Brianna Wiest, and I realize how easily I am tilted off my core.
“i could never be jealous of a person,” writes Gabi. Why waste your wanting on ephemeral, messy, silly little people when you could contemplate our shared nearness (and distance) to the celestial bodies?
Just recently, my family received an invitation to a baby shower from my cousin and his wife. My mom is contemplating going, and with my back turned, I am rolling my eyes because this is the kind of shit that I thought I was done with. I thought it was tacky to have a nighttime, formal dinner baby shower, just like I thought their wedding was tacky. I had thought weddings were for swirling on the dance floor with your family and friends to 2000’s hip hop, drinking champagne, and contemplating who was next in line for love. But instead, we were audience to three hours of pageantry and pretending we were in a real, live Disney movie.
The next afternoon, I got a text from my bank app—the wedding gift I had given (a check) was deposited promptly the next afternoon.
I myself taste the salt in what I write. But what stretches my heart is the realization that I have lived so long in the logic, the hierarchy of a world that has never really mattered to me.
So who is to blame?
Hi, Hello, Hometown Zero
Here is the hierarchical logic of my hometown:
Being rich and beautiful will make you important. If you have only one of these, there is hope for you, but being rich is better because you can convince people to pretend you are beautiful. Bonus points for your proximity to whiteness.
So long as you go to church, you can let yourself do whatever you want! Having an affair with your friend’s husband? Just throw a bake sale for your church to show everyone you are a child of God! Stole government funds from the hospital so you could go to Europe? All good, Sunday mass is right around the corner. Not only will God forgive and forget, he will also give you a mask to wear so you can be who you really are.
The needs of the collective (and those who are more important than you) will always supersede the needs of the individual.
Women should find a man for whom they can be beautiful, dutiful, and obedient.
So in this logic, I rank very, very, very low. I would probably rank a zero in my hometown.
And here, I wish I were sighswoon with her transcendent detachedness and her breathy, wide-seeing “so what?”. But I’m not. I squish myself into the equation of my tiny, green little hometown in the heart of the nowhere ocean:
Single mom, no man in sight, what’s WRONG with you?!
+
no discernible whiteness lol
+
no God-god-Jesus-god to guide you
+
can’t dance, can’t speak the tongue, what you’re too good for your culture?
+
who knows what i do for work? oh my god, she has to work, that’s so sad
+
sharp tongue, clothes are too tiny or too large
+
nothing to offer—no house, no fame, no wealth
=
a nice big fat zero.
Or, maybe a two, because I’m not fat (again, this is THEIR logic!).
“Okay, you caught me. That hurts. I’m not above it.” I give myself a few beats to let that sink in. Those beats drag themselves into a song—an earworm you’d hear on the radio. Next, I’m dancing to it, playing it all out with my mom, who loves to repeat the drama of it all but still can’t catch the tune, the melody, the heart of what I’m actually saying, which is:
Nobody can see it. Not them and not you. And if you could, you’d see that I am building a dimension far away,
spinning a new world,
unfettered by rules.
A love equation for the Hometown Zero
It’s okay that I’m not the easy-breezy type. It’s also okay that I’m not a stoic and that I am sensitive, even to things that have little to do with me. Everything is under a microscope or a trip to the depths. Zooming out and letting go is not really my forte.
I don’t know if I believe in a “solution” because I don’t think there is really a problem.
It can be as simple as rewriting yourself into your own world. You can make yourself the center, or you can make it an adventure of orienting yourself amongst the things that pull you toward their orbit. I think the best existence may be one in which both are true.
A love equation I wrote for myself:
a writer and artist of emoting
+
a dreamer and world-builder
+
a purveyor of tastes and styles
+
unweighted by obligations
+
a generosity that protects its wealths
+
an effervescent femininity
+
someone who believes in the love and magic of
doing it my own way.
Okay. I’m done.
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