Semantic Distance

i arrived in san francisco at 4:37 am, my american passport feeling heavy in my bag. i stared outside the train windows with wonder, finally free from the grip of adolescence. an immense pride reverberated through my chest as i traced the power line signals with my eyes up and down and up and down, daydreaming. i know people say wisdom is earned through time, but that’s just a lie we tell ourselves for not figuring out something important sooner. i knew the depths of my ego before my 13th birthday for god’s sake. i couldn’t afford to not know who before it was necessary as i feared my personality would calcify before i cared to revert anything back.

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i didn’t bother buying anything for my dorm since the cost of lugging it to campus would be beyond anything i could afford as a freshman, so i made peace with the fact that i’d be digging around the 7th page of results on facebook marketplace, all ready to make conversation with an eccentric, geriatric man living at the corners of the mission district. i’d practiced (more like rehearsed) my spanish during the summer to prepare. although i was making my way through grammar books, i was more so motivated by completing the exercises cover-to-cover rather than the opportunity to label myself as quote-unquote multicultural.

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the air was colder than i remember. the hairs on my body stiffened as i made my way to retrieve the rest of my bags farther down the cart. i don’t remember the last time i traveled alone. i often rejected my mother’s offers to visit during her writing residencies outside of florida. “it’ll be exciting!” she’d exclaim, “you’re the most precious cargo!” she’d joke. there was something so juvenile about being escorted by flight attendants between gates. why would i want someone (let alone a person i know) to look at me and think i’m helpless codependent child on the way to to see their mommy? i’d rather die, full stop. i don’t care that i legally need airline employees to vigilantly monitor me like i’m an escaped (now detained) criminal in intra-precinct travel. and besides, my mom would only be gone for two weeks at a time, definitely not worth eroding my dignity for.

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i first read wendy brown when i was 16 and in search of an answer for something substantial. the world was in need of a knife to cut it in two, a knife to start the autopsy for its growing coldness and ill will. what if i’m tired of smiling knowing i’m capable of committing evil to get my way in a system that allows it? anyway anyway anyway. brown treated walls less as physical barriers and more like function of capital. i obviously knew what this meant abstractly, but i cared more when she said it, feeling as if she’s verbalizing a lesson made specifically for me. yes: neoliberalism is a disease that is eroding our institutions from the inside out. yes: we are living on borrowed time on all axes; the doomsday that awaits us is not a future we can push away with abstraction, it’s here metastasizing. i subconsciously read brown as a exposure therapy for the unearned positivity i was surrounded with at the time. my father celebrated were had when i left my room to sit on the couch with him—i didn’t want to talk to anyone. maybe my house felt like a small political apparatus, our rooms designated as safe zones. i devoured books to arm myself from potential attacks. i didn’t care what i learned. i cared that i could defend myself. my worldview became a shield. my words a dagger.

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my lyft driver had a cross dangling from the rear view mirror, a picture of his daughter sat on the dash, his wife on the phone. what else could he have wanted?