Irony

Imagine spending two valuable hours of your time doing homework for the last period of the day when you could have been furthering your creative ambitions. Imagine going without lunch because you're busy working on this essay. Imagine working in sweltering heat, sweat beading on your forehead and smudging the ink, your stomach rumbling like distant artillery and the acid eating away at the lining because you're so hungry.
And then imagine the stupid woman not coming to class.

End it on this

You see, in the past I had a dream, a fantasy. I thought that we would last, become a little family. Then one, two, three, four, the years were flying by, they soared and it's my gut feeling it's not happening for me. So...
Let's end it on this, give me one more kiss. Let's end it on this, let's end it on this.
You see, it's hard to face the addict that's inside of me. I want to fill my glass up with you constantly. I've been here before, but I never ever felt this sure and now I know I've been dreaming and your actions have inspired me.
So let's end it on this, give me one more kiss. Let's end it on this, let's end it on this. Just one more wish, one last kiss. Let's end it on this, let's end it on this.
I open up, you ignore me. No, you're not listening at all. And if I could turn back the pages of time, I'd rewrite your point of view. Washed up on the shore, given one last chance to try some more, but I'm tired, I'm freezing, man - we'll stop and call it history.
Let's end it on this, let's end on this...

Goodbye. I don't like you anymore and I never loved you. So stop looking at me like that.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow I have a test. A test of my proficiency in understanding the "sophisticated English" of Caribbean Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. A test of my tolerance of a man who is obsessed with the past, who will not let go of colonialism. Given by a teacher who preaches "the Caribbean experience" of having "no identity" to me. I was born here. I grew up here. Don't give me that bullshit about having no identity. I have an identity. It's people like Derek Walcott who won't let themselves acquire the good parts of someone else's culture because they're too busy whining over what their ancestors lost generations ago when my European ancestors enslaved them.
For God's sake, it's not my fault. I played no part in it. Don't punish me by being racist. Hating the white people is not going to get you anywhere in a world that becomes progressively whiter and whiter with each generation.
I'm not saying to be completely assimilated. I'm not saying you shouldn't retain parts of the culture and traditions of your ancestors. But at the same time, why do you want to start a "back to Africa" movement? You would hate it in Africa, just as the Indians here would hate it in India. Anyone would hate it there - they're more third-world than this goddamn place. And that's saying something.
I hate this country now. It was beautiful to me once, with the long curved beaches of Mayaro and Manzanilla where the waves crash onto the shore and the water is colder than you'd ever think it in a tropical climate, where coconuts litter the shoreline and where if you're not careful while you're running like a demon on the sand, you can step on a jellyfish and seriously hurt your feet. This mad country with its hills and its vast undulating plains, where everything is green unless it's dry season and if you're not careful you could twist your foot in a crack in the ground. I almost broke my ankle like that in my own backyard one hot year.
But now? Now the people have made it ugly. Who isn't racist is too concerned...good God, this furor in the paper about wanting to change the name of the football team from the Soca Warriors to the Soca Chutney Warriors because they think soca is a black music form and it doesn't adequately represent the 40% Indian population of this country - which chutney, an Indian music form, does. Christ, if you want to be all-inclusive, you'd have to call them the Soca Chutney Steelpan Carnival Hosay Parangsoca Ragga Soca Calypso Rapso Warriors. And I mean, come on, that would be ridiculous.
The people here are ugly. They're narrowminded with a vengeance. They won't look past their own noses. They say there is tolerance and acceptance, they speak of Trinidad as a cosmopolitan place where all ah we is one, but they lie. I know the truth, I live it every day.
Here the Indians marry the Indians and say the "Creoles" - the common term for black people, generally used by those of Indian descent - are barbaric. Meanwhile the blacks deride the Indians as greasy and stupid (this is because of, I believe, the tradition of Indian women staying with their husbands through years of abuse) and say the Syrians are running the country - behind a black government with a black Prime Minister - and of course, everybody hates the whites. We're the cause of every evil this country possesses, because we colonized it with slaves. Betcha anything if we gave them all free one-way tickets back to their homelands of Africa and India they'd be crying to come back in a week.
I'm so sick of it here. I want to leave. When I'm finished A-levels in June (so close, so far), I want to forget formal education. I can get a job as a barista, behind a counter in a deli, in a bookstore, it doesn't matter. A normal nine-to-five with a salary that lets me pay my rent and survive. I don't have to be rich - I don't expect to be...or want to be. I measure my success not by the balance in my bank account, the rung I occupy on the social ladder or the person who designed the clothes on my back, but by what I've achieved for myself internally. Whether I'm happy with the person I am, whether I like that last paragraph I've just typed. Whether I think tomorrow's going to be a beautiful day.
Tomorrow I turn eighteen. Tomorrow I am legal to do anything in this place. The age of consent passed at sixteen, driving at seventeen. At eighteen I can drink, smoke, vote and leave my mother's house and she will hold no claim on me. She will not be able to tell the police to bring me back.
Tomorrow, I see freedom. It will not be until June that I can grasp it.

Proof that I am evil

These shots of my (much older) brother and myself were taken by my cousin's digital camera at her house on the 10th of December. For proof that I am indeed an evil creature born to serve a diabolical purpose, look at my eyes.



Convinced? I know I am.

Adam speaks

Leon Schmidt, twenty-six, was a handsome man once. He is tall, his hair done in neat cornrows, and his skin is mocha-coloured, impossibly smooth. His open, staring eyes are light brown. He has awesome facial structure, with high cheekbones and a once-straight nose which is now a bloody mess. Judging from his current attire, he was a snappy dresser. He could have easily been a model.
According to what I find in his wallet, he attended law school prior to his sudden, violent and untimely death in this dark alley. His body lies where it fell when his killer finished beating him, sprawled over garbage bags and trash. My flashlight catches a pair of glowing eyes for a moment, and then the rat vanishes into the shadows with the faintest scuttling noise as the rain comes down.
The cause of death isn't immediately apparent - Schmidt had the crap beaten out of him, and his injuries are many and severe, but judging from the frothy dried blood at his mouth, I'm betting on a punctured lung from a broken rib. I am, however, not Sutherland. She's the one with the degree, she'll be able to say for sure what killed this man. But there is a sinking feeling in my stomach, because the markings on his body are commensurate with knuckles. Someone killed this man with their bare hands.
I shouldn't even be here. Freezing rain soaks my hair, and through my sweater and my leather jacket I can feel the biting cold of a New York pre-winter. Miles away, in a hospital where the fluorescent lights are glaringly bright on the green walls, Ashley is in labour. My beautiful wife, who I love more than this city or this job. She's out there, and my cell phone rings with reports of complications and distress and insufficient dilation.
What do you want to do, Adam? Trent asks me. Poor kid, he's probably scared shitless. He's only twenty-five, what does he know about pregnancy and the obligation I have to the job? The doctors want to cut her. But it's dangerous. You have to give them permission.
He wants to know what I want. What is more important, my twenty-three-year-old wife or our unborn child. I don't know how to answer those questions. I can't answer them. And the decision I make seems like the easiest decision I've ever made. I dial Russell, get him out of his warm bed, and tell him there's been a murder. I tell him Ashley's in labour and I tell him I'm putting my faith in him and in his partner Bates to get this done.
Russell knows me. He knows Ashley. He understands what this means to me. He'll be on the wet, cold crime scene within ten minutes.
And then I'm sprinting to the nearest cab and telling the driver to get me to my wife. My life, my world. My earth doesn't turn without her. I die without her. My phone rings. They couldn't wait, Adam. They're taking her into surgery.
The rain stops falling as my own tears begin.

Musings

I find myself in a reflective mood this rainy afternoon. Outside the sky is cloudy, grey, wet. It's rained for most of today already - tomorrow there will be the usual headlines about some village or the other left stranded after the collapse of a bridge, the boys who died after swimming in swollen rivers, the stories of farmers whose crops have been destroyed and want compensation from the government. As though the government caused the rain.
I'm sick of love. Sick of empty words and broken promises. Right now I'll be happy if I never fall in love again, if I stay single and alone for the rest of my life. Life's so much simpler that way. And even as I say that I see Adam from the corner of my eye and I know that life isn't simple at all. I'll always be in love. Whether anyone else can see him is the question.
And I don't care. He's mine. He'll always be mine.