We fall asleep head to toe like two shoes in a box

The pigeon came on the subway the same day I started to dissect vegetables at the kitchen, and Boston suddenly seemed so big and strange, about to take off. The pigeon—the Red Line, got on the Davis, off at Porter. It hesitated a moment at the ledge between door and platform, like my friend Emma, who’s afraid to step onto escalators. It dove precisely into a cluster of pigeons fighting over a bread, like it had heard about it. I wondered if they had all come here by means of public transportation. Earlier that day, I was at work in Davis, kitchen, café; it was rainy on the Fourth of July and nobody was ordering vegan food. I started cutting feta to kill time. I placed my knife on the border between dairy and air, where you can only tell the knife was on something when you press down, and a cross-section flops down. I cut them one by one by one and spread them one by one by one on the wooden cutting board. They were not translucent but airy. It showed me for the first time how much fetas are made of air. Before I could think of any meaning for them, three new orders with different allergies of the same item came in, so I threw them all in the too-short trash can. I swept them down altogether, but for a moment they separated in mid-air, and spiraled independently.

After the pigeon left, I left—Porter, then Harvard—arriving at Central, where a Korean Zen center sat on a quiet side street and held dinner before meditation on Tuesday evenings. The senior monks at the center are all white people with Korean names. The person who greeted me was called the greeting master, who led me to the kitchen and the kitchen master. It was all very silly. Nobody spoke Korean. They say Bon Appétit before eating together, which is not even English. It felt like the most peaceful form of cultural appropriation, and I couldn’t even get mad, because I wasn’t supposed to be mad. You were supposed to leave all your rage outside the Zen Center. All your anger towards cultural appropriation on the carpet outside the mud room, the stairs extending out from the underground, on the wings of commuter pigeons, the airpockets of sliced feta.

I meditated. All I could think of was food and animals. Someone farts loudly and it sounds like a bear. Outside, cars wailed. I tried to focus my attention on the mantra I wasn’t supposed to use but worked: no need to think, don’t know. I kept trying to piece together the day’s moments into a story, to be made into a film I can make later, but they travelled away together, like a clown car overflowing. I walked behind them, watched them go. Outside, the fireworks started, and the dim room was painted red, white, and blue, then mixed colors, then only in degrees of brightness, like a solid becoming gas in a middle school textbook, except each particle was a 30-year-old white person with a Korean name. Their gray robes took on American colors, and it all felt very meaningful, but I just kept chanting, No need to think, don’t know, no need to think, don’t know.

I leave Central, to Kendall, to Charles/MGH. I buy a pint of ice cream at the corner store. Working at the vegan cafe, meditating, all these things made me want to sin. I brought it home to my friend, Emma, who I started living with not long ago. The AC was still broken, and we were friends, so we must be clothed, ergo we had lined up a series of fans along the wall, circular black infants born from the land of quick air, as we waited for their mother from the land of cool breezes and happiness. We ate one of those Ben and Jerry's icecreams that looks like everything and nothing, sitting across from each other on the couch with our knees up to our chests, facing each other, like straight men trying not to seem gay.

She said that her coworker, Alia, had been talking to her about children, and she wondered if that counted as flirting. I asked what they talked about, and she said the practicalities of lesbians having children. “She said, ‘So I’m half Indian, half white. If my partner is white, I would ethically have to get a white sperm, because or else I’d be picking the race of my child, which feels weird. But if I use a white sperm, the Indian part gets diluted more than it is now. It would become half of the half of the baby’s DNA.’ Then she puts her forearm next to mine!”

“Woah.”

“To show how she’s barely darker than me. And I thought wow, she touched me.”

“That’s practically intercourse.”

“I know right.”

“So what did you say?”

“I was going to answer, but the fireworks started.”

“But what would you have said?”

“I think she should have the sperm of another half-Indian half-white child. That way it’d be like a Russian Roulette.”

“We leave the fate of Alia’s racial lineage up to God.”

“We’ll see if God’s racist.”

The ice cream was sweating, so Emma drank what's left of it. She asked me about my day. I told her. I hoped she could make sense of it, as she usually did. Emma’s not a film student, so she can see the world better than I do. She doesn’t consider the practicalities of turning a day into a story, a story into a film, so she could just see moments as moments, all the things they inherently mean. She squirmed about the pigeon (“I’d fucking kill myself”), was silent with the feta, and lingered on the fact that the white Korean Buddhists said Bon Appétit. She couldn’t find any deeper meaning in that, but we both agreed it made for a beautiful sentence.

We fell asleep head to toe like two shoes in a box.