I blame genes.

As if I were a craven housewife punishing myself with lustful wonder because I missed out on the world, and am forced to watch you mature without my expertise—now, just to hear second hand of your growth would be enough. I am dry humping the zeitgeist. I fill your body with smoke.

The poison of how smoking makes everyone feel about death and care, is worse than the second hand, or my addiction, in that we can blame a host of genes for my addiction. I can’t do shit about how anyone else feels about me breathing words into your head and smoke into your lungs. Those are their feelings. The air I took over is here for everybody but I am dedicating it to you. You’re welcome.

As a young person I wanted my body to make more sense, for my hands to be a little bigger, arms a little stronger; to have a loose drape figure if not an hour glass. I wanted to be Grace Kim, whose pants always seemed to fit comfortably on her. I realized it was because her parents bought her clothes from nice stores. But I blamed my genes then because it would be sacrilege to blame my family.

My heart breaks every time someone tells me they were ashamed of being Asian as a kid, and had wished they were white. Never have I ever. I hear it a lot out here. What an awful feeling. In California where I grew up, we’d have performed some chaotic intervention before you learned to speak in public like that.

One chooses one’s idols. It is a choice. It is. So it is tragic to me when your idols are white. At least all I wanted was gene therapy, I say to myself. At least all I wanted was to withdraw all of the blood and marrow from my body and transform myself at the level of the molecule. Nothing as drawn out as falling for the angels in your posters.

Genes are nothing but a story. I could never prove the math of who I am, or who you are. I am not a scientist. I can’t speak the language of molecular biology. Genes are made up. Genes are something I talk about to get over the fact that I can’t have everything I want, not even the one thing I want more than anything. Genes are the product of my imagination. My breath in your lungs is a product of fantasy.

Genes are not real; not if I can’t grab them by the throat, with my perfect hands, and wrest my draping body from your smoking mouth.