Decolonial Summer, Postcolonial School
Part 1: Summer debrief and self-reflection
I: Summer at home
The air was thick this summer. The type of air that usually doesn’t usually come till late July suffocated us in June. It was heavy air that doesn't let your sweat dry on your skin — the beads left on your arms until gravity pulls them off you. It was sticky air that makes you yearn for the dryness of air conditioning so strong you just want to curl up in your bed with a blanket and a book. A very different air than the dry Southern California air I have learned to love.
This oppressive air put me in a trance for the first part of summer. My routine day-in and day-out was the same:
wake up, work, home, eat dinner, sleep.
The first half of the summer felt like a cage — like a circus tiger, locked up in the stuffy hull of a ship traveling across the Atlantic Ocean waiting to be shown off to the wanting wealthy for a taste of the exotic. The morning was the same. I woke up, usually early around 6:30a and was out the door by 6:55a. I would speed the ten minute drive to work, making it 7 minutes and being 2 minutes late for my shift. I would stand on my tippy toes over the half-wall in the back to say “hi” to my coworker, Ryan, while I hung up my New Yorker tote.
Behind the counter work, my sweat was like glue. Binding my work clothes to my body. Clothes felt like a trap the whole summer. The mixing of my school wardrobe, and the leftovers in my room from high school didn’t seem to mix very well. Preppy older women and men in polos is the regular uniform of where I live. A style that I am not unfamiliar to, a style reality that I lived in for my whole childhood, but one that I have grown to resent. Sure, some people are casual, granola even. But if you are a little granola looking, you’re probably talking about your “mental health retreat,” you run for people in the City. (More on my experience and thoughts on wealth in later letters.) I felt like I was in a liminal wardrobe — not fully Pitzer-ified and definitely not Fairfield County. When I put something on that leaned more Pitzer I felt out of place, but when I put on something that was more Fairfield County, I felt suffocated by the rigidness that those clothes seemed to have. But no matter what I wore, the sweat would always bead up, and the clothes would always pull themselves closer to my skin, getting tighter and tighter, until I was liberated by the chill of hardwood on my back when I got home.
Noon would hit, and I would grab my free sandwich out of the fridge. I tossed it on the panini press; pouring a glass of mint iced tea or stealing a raspberry lime Spindrift from the retail fridge, while I waited for the sound of the cheese bubbling up on the 480°F cast iron.
The old church pew in the back of the store, where I would eat, seemed to swallow me during my breaks. Not a swallowing preceded by a violent chewing, but a swallowing that was continuous, slow, consuming, almost peaceful. Like when you slowly sink into a too-soft couch, not realizing you’re being swallowed up before your discomfort forces you to readjust. Maybe it wasn’t that deep though, maybe the pew isn’t symbolic of me sinking into a life that made me feel like one of Twyla’s coworkers at Café Tropical, maybe it was my back pain. The back pain was from a car crash I got into with my friend, over Winter break. I didn’t realize that whiplash wasn’t just a quick recovery. I had pain in my back until recently. It sounds dramatic, but I thought that I might have to stop being a barista. I couldn’t stand as long, my feet hurt after an hour of work. I love coffee, I love being a barista. But most of all, I couldn’t live my life the same as I could before. Everything had to become more planned, more careful, more… boring.
I was talking to my friend the other day. We both have back pain, but didn’t always have it. We were talking about how it made us realize how problematic chronic issues become. You have to accommodate every part of your life. I feel like my back pain set the grey tone of my beginning of summer: wanting to have more energy to do things, being frustrated that I didn’t.
During this grey haze, I was resistant. Resistant to reconnecting with friends from home, resistant to seeing the beauty that was around me every day, resistant to enjoying my life at home. Frustrated with the difference of the people at home, that it blinded me to the possibilities that were right in front of me.
But resistance is only part of a cycle where acceptance is soon to come.
Catch me next week :)
in community,
your friend aaron