REVISED: ESSAY AND COVER LETTER 3: Buddhism in Bedford

Final Draft: BuddhismBedStuy

Cover Letter: CoverLetter3

PDF: BuddhismBedStuy

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUiQ4S7v7PA&feature=youtu.be

 

Buddhism in Bedford

The smell of sweet white wine lingered on my breath as I slid into the driver’s seat of my car.  Exhausted by the day, I took a minute to gain my bearings before turning the key perched in the ignition, ready for flight.  I pulled away from my parent’s house. I have no intention of going back there again.

All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions.
Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.1

I am my mother’s first and only daughter.

She’s lived almost her entire life in the same four block radius.  Located in the heart of Queens, the community has been built up around Catholic churches and concrete ball fields, butcher shops and local pubs.  Union workers sporting brogues neighbor chain-smoking mob bosses in perfect harmony, accepting other immigrants into the neighborhood with silent nods, everyone existing together among the juniper-lined blocks of brick row houses.

From the day that I was born, I have been the center of her world.  She molded me, her very own creation, flexible, malleable, into the person that I am today.  A teacher by nature, I was educated every minute from the start.  Letters and numbers turned into words and solutions that would provide me with the key to every door of opportunity imaginable.  I was a hundred thousand dollar investment, a manifestation of every dream that she had drawn up for herself before it happened.
The very life that I had taken from her by existing was now becoming a reality.

I was her dream, and her truth.

I was her life.

I will always remember when I did the math for the first time.  The green of my eyes popped against my freckled cheeks, shining with pride as I bragged about my parents’ anniversary being on St. Patrick’s Day. I told tales of growing up a Hutchinson, serving up double shots of humor alongside gentle jabs at the amount of Beefeater that my father keeps under his work bench in Long Island City. The laughter of my peers fueled the conversation as stories of youthful debauchery leapt like flames from seat to seat in the back of the bus.
“Isn’t your birthday in October?”

I went silent.  For the first time, I had finally done the math.

“You’re a love child.”

The words have never resonated with me;

I was just a child.

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts, we make the world.2

She stared at me.

Her fist had hit me square, drawing a stream of blood from my now battered nose. I stared back at her. I could taste the drip down the back of my throat, warming me from the inside and flushing my face a deep shade of red. The chill in the winter air had plastered the smoke to my oversized jacket, my pockets betraying me with ashen evidence of my afternoon.

Never forget this feeling.

I had repeated those words to myself so many times before. The embarrassment in front of my friends and the overwhelming loneliness at my most vulnerable childhood moments now stand where some of my most cherished memories should live. I snapped back to reality as we turned to walk my niece up and down the stoops of the third block; her fairy wings sparkled each time she stepped out from underneath the awnings of the porches. They all looked the same. The process was mundane as an adult, dressed in a flannel and jeans though the sidewalk had been taken over by dragons and witches and ghosts. I procured a smile to my face and turned to my mother:
“How did you guys do this for so many years?”

Our gazes met over the sea of small children who had infiltrated the normally silent streets on which we ourselves had respectively walked years ago.

“Your father and I used to take you to Kate’s.”

She continued to recount the story of how each year, after we had drained the few good blocks in the neighborhood of all of their candy, we would trick-or-treat around the square bar in the pub where my parents had met.  Drunken old men would throw wads of ones and fives into our oversized plastic pumpkin baskets, the only thing sweeter than the Maraschino cherry juice that had stained my lips a bright shade of red.  My brother and I left the bar a few hours later, smiling and over saturated with sugar and singles.

Thoughts of the past flooded quickly into my mind;

I was drowning – no – swimming

in the bloody waters of my memory.

“I had to leave the room.”

Through the dim lights, our eyes met over well whiskey and cheap beer as they have so many times before.  She had been with me through all of the awkward moments that consisted of our high school experience; we did it again for four years of college.  It’s all a little blurry, but somewhere in that time, I had dragged her down to the local planning clinic to deal with my situation.  All I wanted was to out an end to the angst and depression that had taken over every minute of my day for the past few weeks, since my body had turned on itself, a mutiny of the cruelest kind.

The room was cold.  The metal chilled my skin where the table remained uncovered beneath me.  I stared at the cracks in the plastered ceiling, tracing their path across the barren white tundra as I searched desperately for an escape.  This was not my first time; I had made sure that I wouldn’t remember what happened before.  I was sober now, and every physical, mental, emotional pain that I had numbed out before, every thought that pulsed through my mind with the rhythm of the blood flowing from my body melted into the cheap paper that supported the weight of my body.
“Sometimes I think about what would have happened…”

My voice trails off into the sounds of my father’s motown records
reverberating off of the wood panels
of the bar that smells like Kate’s.
 I was not going to become my mother.
Not then… and not now.

I cannot imagine what is going on
or what has happened
that is bad enough
for us to not talk.
It’s breaking my heart.
I wanted to soak her shirt with tears over break ups and failure, depression and abortions.  I wanted to feel the warmth of her arms around me when I figured out something that couldn’t be evaluated on a prestigious rubric or printed on a diploma.  I wanted my mother to accept me as I had become, not as she had imagined me.

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth;
not going all the way, and not starting.3

I sat in the back of my car for hours that day.  My beaten Nikes hung inches above the greyed out pavement on Macdonaugh Street, my untied laces swaying softly in the wind.  I leafed through the book in my right hand, maneuvering my way through the words as I exhaled the smoke of another Parliament. The spring sun shone through the windows in my car, freckling my skin and illuminating the pages in front of me.  The screw that had punctured my tire had drawn me to a staggering halt; I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Manifest destiny.

I collapsed on the couch we had rescued just hours before making the old living room of your brownstone into our home.  My bones ached to the core with the pains brought on by a weekend of decadent behavior.  You ran your fingers through my hair and scratched your manicured nails up and down my back, beckoning my feelings to the surface of my skin with every movement.

I lay silent in your arms, my body paralyzed with a confused guilt conjured by the crossfire of thoughts in my mind. I was more than the thousands of hours of critical thinking readings and spatial math problems, the football routes run to multiplication tables and the hockey games dictated by the names of capital cities. I was more than the pleated blue skirt that enforced social norms and gender roles on my queer body.

I had been everything she had ever wanted
and she had never asked me
about who I was.
About who I am.
Just as the capacity to feel is present throughout the body,
Ignorance dwells in all affliction emotions,
Therefore all affliction emotions are overcome,
Through overcoming ignorance.4

I take another sip of wine, taking a piece of ice onto my tongue and allowing it to melt down to nothing. I was finally in a place where I could let go of myself, letting my thoughts flow freely through my mind and letting go of the negative thoughts that have consumed me for so long.

I am everything she has ever wanted.
I am a part of her life.
I am myself.