Because I put my feet down on asphalt when I want to brake. The downhill behind our Marshfield home a portal to a daymare of mine where my Achilles heel is sliced by a rusty chain and paternal disappointment. Because my sister is a natural, a real Eddy Merckx with a puff ponytail. No tan hands on the bars, confidence abundant to pedal up to the lone cloud nauseatingly high in the Huntington Beach summer sky. My Scooby Doo push pop—I get that every time— is pooling around the hairbands that live on my wrist, just in case, I hide under a beach umbrella because I have learned to fear sunburn since I was five. Because the streets of Fisherman’s Wharf are a daredevil’s red carpet. Evil does not live inside drivers with eyes on the top of their heads; I do. Who am I when I lay on the sizzling pavement, staring at Coit Tower and switching with frequency from spotted black to burning white? Who am I when my hands cage my wail as my eyes have returned to a spot above my nose to look upon a half-woman, half-aquamarine metal tangle of a person for the very first time? To avoid becoming both, I decide to be neither. Until I am 31, late to every doctor’s appointment, no groceries in my refrigerator because my father is gone, my mother still works, and my sister is postpartum and advised not to drive until next Wednesday. Because my gut controls my brain, who commands my lungs, who become the twin overlords of my legs and delicate inner workings of my ears. Then, I must think of my right-sided Eustachian tube who has ruptured countlessly before with the wheeze of a sad balloon. I must think of how I rearrange anatomy to explain my chronically bad balance. My gut, dear obstacle, mixing your modern acid anxiety with my primordial instinct to stay rooted to the ground, to never try and fly because flounder is a monster worse than any Saber-toothed tiger. Because, you see, if humanity depended on me to crawl out of the water with a curiosity so incurable not even death by the laser Sun or claws of some flying reptile scared me away, we would still be fish.
Tori Ingram, ’24