Kubi Ukungalaleli

She said,

Go to West Africa, they will see you as queens. You will be royalty there, twins,

It was my first semester in an uncharted land.

And she had no idea about the events leading up to that point, the cornbread and peppers and beans and the story of how you begin to remember, how badly I wanted it,

I think it probably was a dream for me longer than perhaps necessary; still.

There you will be treated as queens, we went out west and I said remember this as how it should be.

And what route? You make a decision and ten years fall in line, it is such a great fallacy of youth that you have time to figure everything out. You just make decisions and they whittle you to who you are, for better or worse. You sit with others and they say “what was that word you just said,” and you look at them as if in jest and the other says, “recidivism?” and offers a definition and it is a legitimate query and all of a sudden in your small corner of the world you’re so very alone.  You retreat back to your corner. I remember the lentil soup my last quarter at OU and being alone and so incredibly content. That is a memory that stands out. Alone in the world. Alone in the world and so incredibly OK with it. My roommate had long since moved out (does she know this story?) and I’d figured out how to bootleg old movies no one really wanted to see. There was a shop around the corner that sold Nat Shermans and life was remarkably solitary and OK. I’d tried to explain the story of my discontent with Vegas to the one who got so drunk she couldn’t talk and it became impossible. I hated myself by the end of it. Sometimes you just want to be normal.

But before, in another life, the cigarettes there were multicolored and we’d sit on the kitchen floor and smoke. Her mom didn’t care at all, we’d collect our contraband liquor and sip it out of the containers we had available to us. Mason jars and Tupperware. The world seemed totally open and possible.  Then you grow up and realize that there’s not an overlap. She’s there, drinking coffee diluted with sweetened condensed milk on the apartment floor (has it ever tasted as good?) not knowing that the world is so cutting and closed and there are stadiums of people wearing team colors and having no actual idea why. Sometimes I think there's not enough gin in the world, or my liver needs to understand.

There has to be a way to bridge the gap. Life was way too important and fleeting back then, and too rote now. There is magic in this experience. We, for some reason, are programmed to forget it. And it’s so fleeting, isn’t it? We’re so fucking bullheaded about it, as though we have it all figured out, as though we have all the answers. It’s really scary when your mentors start to pass on. I remember when Bubba died, dad talking about generational shifts and it never being comfortable, it just becomes reality. Did you ever think you’d be the oldest generation? He also said that feeling of not feeling like an adult doesn’t go away. The five year old on the bicycle and I want to die before you. My heart weeps for how fleeting it all is. Shouldn’t we be excellent to each other? It’s all done so God damn quickly.

RIP Rob Smurr.