You Can Call Me Akfak

The Sisohpromatem

When Blatta Polyphagidae awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed on his trash into a tiny human. He began to choke. Desperately searching for the correct use of lungs, which were foreign objects to him. Normally Blatta could last without air for about thirty minutes, but he had a feeling that with these lungs he wouldn't last that long. Slowly, Blatta's choking turned to panting, and he got the hang of human breathing. The outside of the Welch's juice box in which he resided began to fluctuate in size with every confused breath Blatta took. Somewhat looking like a lung itself.

Blatta was a baby-boomer. All throughout his youth he and his friends salivated over the prospect of nuclear war. They had once seen on a paper that if humanity destroys itself with nuclear war, cockroaches would inherit the Earth. Blatta was an avid collector of newspaper clippings that mentioned nuclear war. He would collect them, display them, and then get hungry and eat his shrine of nuclear hope. This cycle repeated itself.

"What has happened to me?" Blatta wondered painfully. It was no dream. He thought he could go back to sleep and reawaken as a cockroach again but that was out of the question. And for some reason, sticky grape juice residue didn't feel very comfortable anymore, in fact, it was quite bothersome. Blatta became hungry, even starving. "But I just ate three days ago, how could i be hungry?"

Blatta crawled on all fours through the rip in the juice box. His tender skin was torn on the door and bright red blood ran down his side and onto his double mint doorstep. Blatta had never felt so uncomfortable. Hungry, sticky, and worse—leaking red juice. Blatta remembered where he had seen his favorite snack a year earlier.

He took an enormous bite into the back of the stamp, anticipating that it would end his hunger and satisfy his taste, as stamp glue had always done. Instead, it was disgusting and he promptly disposed of the stamp glue in his mouth and began to rain from his eyes. His thorax, or what he thought was his thorax, began to ache.

Feeling lonely, Blatta followed poop paths in search of his fellow cockroaches. By the time Blatta found another cockroach, his hands and knees were caked with cockroach crap. It was his sister that he found, and when she paused from inhaling banana peels, she looked up at Blatta, screamed, and scurried away as fast as her prothoracic, mesothoracic and metathoracic legs could carry her.

Walking Out the Door

The good bye party was painfully joyful, drawn out, and chaotic. From six until ten I found myself receiving dancing advice from ten year olds who couldn’t hold it back while they watched me dance, listening to a song that a group of guests had rehearsed about friendship, crying in my room, and standing in the center of a fifty-person group hug that swayed back and forth over the sala floor. I left Annunciation House at six am the next day with my three sisters and my three trash bags packed in Jet, my toyota. We traveled east on 10, heading towards the rising sun.

The sun came up in front of us and went down behind us. We were in big old Texas for all of it. I was surprised that no heavy emotions or separation anxiety came over me. I was just driving, and not thinking about much else. Transitions always seem to be less dramatic than I envision.

At three in the morning, excluding gas fills, we hadn’t stopped driving. A caffeine high sister decided that we would pull off and find a Tennessee state park, sleep for a few hours, and then continue. As we entered the heavily coniferous state park, and drove past signs for “rustic cabins,” we had delusions that we could find them, peacefully enter, and borrow the beds for a night. Instead we pulled off a dirt road and tried to sleep. One sister accidentally opened a window a crack and the clamor of her chattering teeth became background music to the rest of us. The other two tried balancing their heads against each other as they tried to find comfort among the steering wheel, center console, and all the other impediments of the front seats. After two hours of futile fake sleep, I hopped in the drivers wheel, and took us to Nashville. Weary eyed, we entered a starbucks, brushed our teeths, deoderized, face-washed, and rested a bit until we made the final push to Ashville, North Carolina.

We arrived in Ashville at four thirty which put an end to our epic thirty four hour (look at “four” and “hour” next to eachother...it must be easy learning to pronounce english words) drive. Next day’s destination was Reston, Virginia where we spent the night, and then continued to New Hampshire the following snowy morning. It snowed all day, and at some point Jet decided to test my skill. The windshield wiper fluid pump ceased to work, which left me periodically rolling down the window, and reaching around to pour fluid on the windshield, as I steered with my other hand. This seemed to do the trick. Jet didn’t succeed in killing me.

Before I knew it, I was back home. After five months on the border I was back to my parallel universe, feeling funny about how easy it was to jump from one reality to the other. I found myself patiently waiting for something to hit me. Now that it has, I wish I had been more patient.

Annunciation House has left me with some things that I won’t be able to get rid off. A knowledge that the more I have the less others have. A knowledge that my lifestyle has the potential to send others into poverty. A realization that there are things more important than my anal antics. A heavy heart that can’t shake off the tears of humans. A view of the dark world that also exists.

It is a swift farewell to the things little Danny dreamed of and worked towards. Good bye to the ambitions of power, a big house, cars, success, approval, and affirmations. So now, I am back to the world in which those goals ruled my life, but I am left without those goals. I am drunkenly stumbling to splice these parallel worlds together, and really, it is really hard.

Exactly at the same moment everything seems to really matter while nothing seems to matter at all. I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way.
I was always good at limbo growing up. But I can’t get under the bar this time.

I’ll start school in about a week, and I hope and fear equally for distraction.