Tenderness
Day 0
I hear conflicting reports on the state of the bees, but my naked eye worries about the plants in my paved back yard which have yet to flower after weeks and weeks of waiting. They should have bloomed, flowered by now. Plants that I intended to have grow a yield, should have bloomed, flowered by now. It has been weeks of waiting in anticipation, while I invoke bees who may or may not exist anymore. The bees need to make these plants fruit!
My husband says the problem is not the bees but the sterility of the plants. Bees will not attend to plants that aren’t fertile.
“The treasures not fit,” my son screams in his four year old patois, as he tries to attach a Lego pirate’s hand, designed specifically to click onto its treasure chest. I can tell that the hand is soft and has lost its integrity. How do I explain all this to a four year old? We are playing in the backyard and I wonder if he understands bees to be helpful.
Day 10
The plants are finally blooming. Potatoes, pumpkins, tomatoes, perilla. All plants I inherited or volunteered from the compost. I just had to wait.
Day 1
Playing music always compels me to write. It has been a trance like practice, both playing and writing in synchrony. Playing with men, however, has mitigated my impulse as I dread the sardonic responses I know to expect sometimes, from my bandmates.
I wondered if their congress with other men would encourage an earnestness not possible when I was not so heavily under the ratio. So I play with more men in the hopes they will read my sweet missives and respond in kind, except I do not want the other men to see what I have to say because it is too precious an aspect of myself to share in mixed company.
This is the context in which our band begins a very short tour. I am delighted to take company with Leo in the other duo, who speaks with such dignity and passion about his cultural specificity. Not defensive or apologetic, but true to himself. Not corny or agenda-driven either. Or, the agenda is Asian liberation out of the marks of an identity politic, generalized so everyone else has to meet us where we are and not the other way around. We talk mostly about food. It is divine.
Breaking bread with Alex who is paired with Leo, later joined by Matt, Eugene and Genevieve, I know we are serving people in our lives and that we all take extreme pleasure in the service. I feel peace.
I dwell too much on the freedom from my own desire, to understand how proximity in the conversation can be its own reward. My articulating soft feelings is as likely to damage the men in my life as the absence of tenderness always destroys me.
So how curious, when the binary is snapped and we have lost the sensibility of gender for a moment. We join Levi and Scott, who challenge the dispositions. I find myself sobbing. We open for Eddy. I sob for her.
I realize, I am not supposed to lose my gender but rather dive head first into its most insidious cliche—Jesus, I am crying over music. For I did not need tenderness. I needed to be tender. I do not need to replace the tenderness I do not receive. I need to BE tender. I need to be tender. It is the only way I will find peace. It is the only way.
Day 12
The record Alex gave me is the only thing I’ve been listening to for the past week. In part because I’m too lazy and depressed to swap out the LP on my turntable, and mostly because it is the sonority for this timeline—a soft articulation of men who are tender, too. Men who will have surely flowered by now.
