my father and i were drinking orange juice at
two thirty in the morning when he turned to me and said,
“i never taught you that you could be anything you
wanted to be because the truth is that you can’t,”
and i decided he was right when i realized i was too
right-brained to work a nine-to-five job and that i’d rather
destroy a computer and call it art than create one and
call it science.

but maybe he was only thinking about the big picture,
and by now i’ve realized that the big picture is never
the most important and that the small scribblings that
mainly go unnoticed matter the most and i thought
back to when a tenth grade teacher had asked me a
simple question and expected a simple response,

and while i had given her a real answer, she claimed it
to be unrealistic and the corner of her lip twitched as she
tried to suppress a laugh, but i wasn’t laughing because
what’s so wrong about saying that, “maybe i want to be
your favorite constellation?” because it’s true —

and, “i want to be the goosebumps on your arms when you
hear your favorite song performed live. i want to be the aching in your
ribs after you’ve laughed too hard, your favorite Sunday dinner,
a constant reminder that you are beautiful and that you are
kind and that you don’t need anybody else to make you happy.
i want to be compassion. i want to be sympathy, treachery,
creativity. i want to be the reason you wake up in the middle
of the night without really understanding why. i want to be
the question, an answer, a hundred possibilities.”

she asked me what i wanted to be, and i told her i wanted
to be everything — and maybe other people don't know how
to feel the same way that i know how to feel,  and maybe that's
because we spend so much time teaching kids how to compute
and to quote instead of how to express and emote and i find that
to be very disappointing.