Genesis

Suffice it to say that, while enduring the woes of the ‘have nots’ during the 90s in Kalamazoo, MI, the idea of beauty and perfection wasn’t exactly at the forefront of my cerebral cortex. Put plainly, I was your traditionally featured tomboy like Vada Sultenfuss in the 1991 classic, My Girl. I rocked bushy brows, baggy clothes, a ponytail, and some severely scarred extremities. I was flat chested and a mess. I literally cringe with anxiety when I come across throwback photos from that decade.

The anxiety comes with the recollection of memories and feelings of inadequacy and how I used to get teased for having only a finite number of outfits to sustain me from week to week throughout junior-high at Hillside. Someone once told me my clothing selection was rumored to be a running joke and wager; odds betting on which outfit I would wear on which day of the week. I thought to myself, how rude! That and being told to my face on the dreadfully yellow school bus, stained with the baby boo-boo green seats, that I was ugly; from the very guy I used to have a crush on…I was crushed on. “Yes”, tomboys have crushes too!

Modern tomboys’ only requirement is seemingly being able to pair the latest Retro Jordan 1s or Yeezys with a dress; never minding the glaringly obvious infraction that nothing else by the way of appearance seems to fall in-line with what a tomboy should look like. I mean let’s be real, tomboys don’t wax! I’m not a hater, but I rather dislike the infringement you know?

Nearing the year of my twenty-first birthday this tomboy still, migrated to the big city of Dallas, TX; the year was 1999. I still remember it as the ‘Summer of Grasshoppers’. How can I ever forget being petrified to pump gas out of fear of what seemed to be thousands of grasshoppers hopping on the windshield, on the hood of the car, in the bucket of dirt and soot water somehow used to clean the windshield, on the ground, my head, my hands. Oh God! It was as if a plague from the Bible had been turned loose and I was living in a chapter of Exodus.

Followed by the chapter and scripture on Sodom; ode’ the burning hot star known as the sun. I remember speaking on the phone with twin sister, who remained back home in Michigan (yet to succumb to the idea of Texas) that it was so hot that you could crack an egg and fry it on the asphalt. I was out of my depth. Why had I moved to such a God forsaken place?

Yet I remained. My mom made the move a year or two prior. The remainder of my immediate family of whom I had grown and spent my life with was here; deep in the heart of Texas. I missed them severely. Moreover, I had a new baby sister I was dying to meet, who would be twenty years younger than myself. I had never, up until that time been away from my mother. I was a freshman at Western Michigan University and was for the first time on my own; well almost, I still had my fraternal; at least for a while longer.

I signed up with a temp agency because although I was fleeing from independence, I still had bills to pay; especially those credit cards they shove down your throat when you get to college. I landed a gig at one of the fortune 500 companies and slowly but surely began to socialize. The irony is most of my acquaintances and at the time; some, of whom I considered friends were all settlers in Texas. None of us were actually born nor raised here so it was an exploration for us all. And just like Christopher Columbus I’d founded a new world whose chapters are never ending; as the book of Genesis, in the beginning…