Mixed-up

I’m a mixed-up person. I chase purity in all the regular, white midwestern ways, but I don’t actually want anything to do with it (or have anything to do with it?).

Sometimes I feel jealous of people who land on decisions as precisely as steeping their tea for just the right amount of time. Who lay out their words and ideas like the neat, symmetrical rows of late-summer corn fields—who say, with no sense of irony, statements like, “I’m the kind of person who….”, or “I don’t do that,” or “this is how I am.”

My own statements mutiny mid-sentence and curl back on each other. I speak in lattice-work, poorly crocheted scarves, and spiraled whispers.

I’m a mixture of a yes, keeping a no as its lover, a Buddhist monk on a bender, someone who ‘doesn’t care for chocolate’ eating fudge. I still don’t really know if I like dessert, but I'll probably eat some with you.

I recognize myself in the confusion of a mixed drink — the sweet childhood-ache of orange juice mingled with that clear, sharp elixir of adulthood. I am the day with quickly passing clouds and sudden shocks of piercing sunlight.

I’d like to think that we were all lied to by omission by the fairy tales, easy morals, and teachers, that our birthright is the chaotic, the roiling, the self that spins on an ever-moving axis.