One:

Face it, guys, I'll never be Taylor Swift. I'd have to be reborn as a sweet girl from northern jersey (or the Midwest--who knows) and have a sweet daddy who set up everything so I don't get stalked while I set up my Jesus music ministry, to reach the lost in Hollywood. Amen. Some things work out in this world, after all.

I like Taylor Swift, she's so delicate in her own way and she's a daddy's girl, like me. It's a sheltering that helps you to value your own delicacy and not give yourself away too easily--a sheltering that you need to grow into, like a giant umbrella and oversized yellow Paddington Bear rain boots. To grow into this sheltering, where you don't really "find yourself," but stay with yourself and learn how to be true to yourself and not lose parts of yourself that are vital. I cried when Taylor lost her key. Funny, I also had a key. It was an old skeleton key that opened the basement to the brownstone. Well, let's face it guys, there's no way to soup up a row-home on the cusp of the ghetto. We got two good years and then gagsta rap hit and it was over. Everyone who wasn't that poor got poverty minded and wanted to sell drugs and join gangs. Where there is a supply, the demand appears. Or the Masons, with their mass marketing spoil the child and spare the rod-age. Funny, now the big hip hop kings are now Masons. Luke, I am your daddy. I used to wear the skeleton key around my neck with a military-style dog-tag chain. In the 11th grade, I made "Gold" honors and got some monetary gifts from my parents and upgraded it to a little gold key that looked like it on a short gold chain that I got in one of the neighborhood jewelry shops where they mostly sold giant gold hoop earrings with Puerto-Rican girls' names in them. It was the key to my heart, to only give to the man that Jesus would bring me to marry. So much for that. It's that part in the key video, where the chain snaps in this barren field and the key drops from her hand to the mud, the sky goes dark and she falls to her knees. I feel your pain, Taylor. I, too, thought better of men, I expected more, so much more, or, at least for the rapture to happen before I turned eighteen and found out just how terrible the situation was and there was no man waiting for me, waiting for the rapture, the way I waited, with a key around my neck and a bible on my lap. Men don't do that. They have Y-Chromosomes that serve as emotional dams. It's so easy for them, they don't have to deal with the double x of maybe this one, the one I've just met, maybe he's the one the key belonged to, the one I waited for while watching the heavens for signs of a flying Jesus at seventeen.

But the house. There were two good years where the house we moved into after super Puerto Rican "badlands" rapage became surrounded by a gang territory war. The Sunnis and the Shiites were constantly at it, red and blue or blue and red, respectively. A memo was sent down from the Superintendent of schools. No child is to wear red or blue shirts. They changed our gym colors to maroon, I think. Third quarter children's clothing earnings went up. Everyone was happy. Except the children, of course. We even had an old-school 1950's style a-bomb drill. I'm guessing because it was the closest thing to a drill for all out gang war that they could find documented. I walked around flinching, unaware, as if a bomb could hit my head all the time. It might be romantic, to get shot in the head, the innocent nerd, bleeding into her thrift store clothing, before it was cool (obvs.), devoid of blues and reds. There was a martyr complex developing.

What shall I wear to school today. A black skirt, a blouse that's an older women's size, with ruffled sleeves. To sneak in a pair of dangly plastic blue earrings, with rhinestones. Maybe today will be the day, I will get shot. I will die as a good Christian, the way people never die anymore. Clutch the violin closely to your body. They'll take it and run. Because it's war, it's war.

At church, they called it Satan's music. All of it, even old Spanish folk music went down the tube. We can't listen to anything else anymore, it must be Christian music. Pray ten times a day, in the morning, forget to eat. Later, think of homework while staring at the ceiling or reading young adult fiction of far away places, like the American suburbs. The girls there have steady boyfriends at eleven. The boyfriend picks her up in his car (his parents car, obviously) and they go on a date to the movies. I'm sure there is an awkward kiss. They kiss, I'm sure.

What is kissing. I hear the sound of sirens, a beautiful song, like something ancient returning to take the thieves away.

No one ever got shot at the school, though later there were rumors of funerals and the younger children at the school were seen often with their gang bandanas, regardless of the rules. I remember at church youth camp one summer, a sweet boy that fell in love with me, but of course I didn't love him, he was really tiny, like a seperate species and there were rumors he had a heroin addiction. I talked to him a bit, about Jesus. I thought it might help him, but his obsession with making the connection romantic was really creepy, so I stopped. I guess the girls in the suburbs who had the boyfriends at eleven would call it "not wanting to lead him on."

Later, they found him in the car, an overdose. Was he thirteen? Sixteen? I think he haunted me for years. A lost soul, still resenting me for the sting of my rejection. Not a sweet ghost, just a resentful energy sucking the life out of me. I tried to give him Christian love, but he's just Freddie fucking Kruger. When will they stop, when will they stop.

Two:

Now they're saying my only hope for a mate (even though I'm not looking), is some five-years younger man who works as a runner/busser at a restaurant and lives with his mother. His feet are always stinky, because, obvs, he doesn't have a girlfriend to "love" him, I mean, clean his socks and shine his shoes and he "started" an associates in, like urban studies or something and dropped out to work and "help mom," which just means be resentful about the way she lumps his laundry with her granny panties because it leaves him smelling like "mom hormomone." It's obviously "pheromone," but he's no scientist, though he will argue incessantly until you give up and jump off a bridge, because, he's a MAN AND HE'S ALWAYS RIGHT.

He will quickly start abusing me, even from the first date and make passive-aggressive remarks about the "age-difference," like I could be his mother, because apparently, his mother must have conceived him at the age of four.

Thank you, Taylor Swift and Good Night.