'I didn’t want to take the elevator'

She stood there in the rain. Thinking about things and nothing. Letting the water drip down her nose. Why don’t people in San Diego run in the rain. Are they afraid of ending up like that poor girl on the news who slipped and fell in front of the TV camera after saying how easy it is to run in the snow? Maybe. But mostly it’s because it’s different. Perhaps people who live here want things to remain the same because then they’ll know who they are and where they stand. Or at least they won’t have to think about it.

I didn’t want to take the elevator because the sign said I shouldn’t in case there’s a fire. At least that’s what I always thought it meant: “In case of fire, use stairs.” I always wondered why the stairs would be better to be burned up in than an elevator. It occurs to me now that maybe the lines that hold the elevator up could get burned and destroyed? Or something? I also realize one could be trapped in the elevator. Cooked alive in that metal cage.

The specter of vegetarianism hovers over me like something I forgot in the back of my mind. Like forgetting to turn off the stove. Last night I had a recurring dream (it followed the dream about Rise & Shine Writers where everything went awry, no one was listening to me, and there were TVs blaring in the background that I kept trying to turn off to no avail). It’s the dream about me killing someone and burying them. It’s always a man that I kill and I can see his gray cheek. I know what it feels like, like when my cousins and I touched my grandfather’s cheek to see what the embalmers had done. I rarely see myself killing him, but I know I’ve done it and now I have to hide the body. Where do I hide it? I know eventually someone is going to find it. Every time I have this dream, unlike other dreams, it seems real after I wake up. I have done it and I’m only now just remembering. Again.

Maybe it’s all those animals telling me to stop killing and eating them.

When I was growing up we had a pair of baby ducks we got for Easter. My little brother would drag them around the yard in his red plastic wagon. The ducks grew up and started pooping on the pavement, like all over the pavement. My parents decided it was time for the ducks to go. They didn’t send them to a farm, though. They took them to the local butcher. My mom, stepdad, brother, and sister went to a neighbor’s house to eat Donald and Daisy for dinner. I stayed home alone, disgusted. I don’t know what I had for dinner that night. Probably Hamburger Helper.

There’s a concept in Buddhism that we should treat every child as if he or she were our own. I like that idea. It takes a village, blah blah blah. And yet we don’t. I don’t. I don’t have kids, so how would I know how to treat them? I feel like I raised my siblings, though, and I think that’s why I never had a strong desire to have children of my own. I know what it’s like. There’s no mystique to changing diapers, to discovering my little sister has eaten the mint floss again. A lot of it. I think a person only needs to go through that once in a lifetime. My projects are my children now. I thought I might have become pregnant when I was in graduate school and it scared me because I would have to choose between my babies. Now I babysit my friend’s kid sometimes. I play with my nephew in Idaho. When I talk to him over FaceTime he says my name. It sounds like a sneeze, similar to how my brother used to say it: “Acho.” And also the sneeze of “I love you.” And it feels like enough.