“And if it’s one thing I hate more than prophecy, it’s self-fulfilling prophecy.” –Bill Maher

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Sorting Through: The End

There’s more than one way for the world to end.

Isn’t that a line from a movie? Some back-alley herald? It must be.

It has to be. Or, at least, it should be.

 

As We Know It

Wikipedia’s incomplete “List of Dates Predicted for Apocalyptic events” contains 159 past predictions of Apocalypse as far back as 634 B.C., when Romans feared the end of Rome due to a dozen so-called prophetic eagles. The source or claimant, via Wikipedia? “Various Romans.”

My mother made her own failed prediction on the day I was born, the same day Vanessa Williams lost her Miss America crown. My mother foretold that I would someday win back that crown. Never mind that Vanessa was the first African American winner, or that we were white folks on welfare watching her win in our government-subsidized trailer—the date overruled all. Her loss coincided with my birth, and marked the first in a long line of familial prophecies.

Since my mother’s doomed prediction on July 21, 1984, there have been approximately 50 worldwide doomsday prophecies. The ’80s were particularly busy with “end-of-days” predictions; there were lulls in 1983 and 1986, but near-death prophecies picked right back up about three months after I was born, and continued on through most of the decade. My sister Daisy arrived in 1985, the year Lester Sumrall released his book I Predict 1985 and asked his few readers, “Who will survive 1985?” (Lester’s guess was no one, naturally.) My brother Ronnie showed up two years after that, in 1987, when Leland Jensen promised apocalyptic doom by Halley’s Comet. Lester and Leland were off by approximately 21 years—my family’s world would end in 2008. Looking back, there were certainly signs, but no one prophecy that spoke of the inevitable.

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One time you took food from my mouth and you didn’t want to but you did it because it was my tongue. That’s what I think about.

You liked me first because of that one day when Mr. Donovan asked me what I thought about some story I hadn’t read and I said it was wicked proper and when he asked me to elaborate I said it was wicked fucking proper and got sent to ISS for the rest of the day.  I could feel you watching me as I walked out and that wasn’t why I did it, I was just so goddamn bored, but it was a nice side-effect. And then you got to go on that field trip to the museum and we were talking a little bit before and I said, Make sure you don’t get caught up in any line dancing or group sex or anything, and you told me I should ditch and come with you because the art teacher never double checked the list anyway and I said What for, the sculpture garden or the group sex? and you said The group sex in the sculpture garden and I thought maybe I could tolerate you after all for a little while before I lost interest, long enough to figure out why you were always alone and why you seemed to never be around at lunch and why you were always chewing up your fingernails and why you always wore your winter coat indoors and there was something in the way your eyes shot away from everything you looked at seconds after you looked at it that told my dick you’d be into it. Like you were distracted enough to fool or something, like tricking a dog into the car to go to the vet. And that’s mean but I was pretty much right.

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The first time I went fishing was in high school. We skipped class and went to the Hillsborough River, got high, and practiced casting lures into the water. I looked over at my best friend, bare tan legs swinging off the dock, just above the tea-leaf water, and I wanted to touch her. Our boyfriends tittered behind us. And we never caught a thing.

The second time I went fishing was with my college girlfriend, a woman named Jennifer who was slim-waisted and lightly freckled and who I took to calling Penny because she was bright and shiny, but also solid and uncomplicated in a way that I liked then. She sought out bass on different parts of that same river in Tampa. We would steal out from our bed early in the morning for what looked like T’ai Chi by the banks. Cast. Reel, Reel, Reel. Cast. Wait.

Later she took me on a boat with her father on a lake in north Texas. I caught bass then, too, but preferred drinking cold Coors Light, watching the darkened shadows of the fish on the boat’s sonar system, the sundance of my bobber on the surface of the lake, and, most of all, the ease with which Penny, my bass fisherwoman, would cast and reel, and then after a long stretch of silence, catch.

“Babe,” she’d turn to look at me then, her eyes wide and blue like a North Texas sky. “Wanna learn to how to take out a hook?”

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“…my crew don’t mind it thick (Uh-uh)/ Every woman ain’t a video chick (Nah)/ Or runway model anorexic/ I love what I can hold and grab on…” Posdnuos, “Baby Phat” by De La Soul

In the south, we’re known for appreciating a “thick” woman, and for a very long time, I was upset that I didn’t have the hips, ass, and breasts my people lift in praise. My mother takes great pleasure in telling stories about how my adolescent self used to stand in the mirror, wondering where my curves were. If I’d had three wishes, one of them would’ve been to give me a fuller, more desired figure. Then I went to college in a city with some of the best food in the country. I found the curves I’d been looking for, and then some. I could tell my then-boyfriend wasn’t thrilled with the weight gain either, but family and friends kept telling me I finally looked like a woman.

After college graduation, I felt good about my weight because I was working out, and the weight had settled more proportionately. My exercise playlists were filled with hip-hop and r&b songs that were dedicated to bodies like mine that didn’t get acknowledged in film and television, unless the women were promiscuous or prostitutes. Sometimes there may have been only one or two lyrics focusing on women with ample figures, but it would be enough. During a time when video vixens had become the cultural equivalent of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders of my youth, I could imagine myself in a hip-hop video. And so I’d kick a little higher, squat a little deeper, knowing I was worthy of song.

The confidence I had in my body was better than it had been in years. I looked in the mirror and liked what I saw, and so did others. Men called me “thick,” desire weighing their eyelids and shining across their lips. Then a few months after I turned 25, I had to have major emergency surgery that left me with a long scar down the length of my torso, ruining the shape of my belly button, and leaving me with digestive issues. My crop top days were over. Bikinis became a part of the past. At 25, this was supposed to be the time I showed off my body the most. Now I had to worry about explaining the scar to intimate partners, hoping it wouldn’t scare them away. It didn’t. They’d kiss the re-knitted flesh to show they didn’t mind, and I’d look away.

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