unicorn orgy

To savor. At first, at the very beginning. The hesitant pause of being an outsider. I view the landscape starkly, summarily, with an eye towards the big picture, the dramatic sweeps, the way it nestles itself into the other larger landscape of what I find familiar.

As an outsider, I see gaping flaws so perfectly obvious to me it seems unjust and cruel that they have not yet been fixed. I see things in black and white.

When an elderly man won’t let me carry my own suitcase, even though I am a powerlifter and he is bent double. I am female-bodied. He has a code to keep, and my feelings about it do not matter.

When my landlord tells me that he’s not racist, but stay away from black kids ages 15-20 because they will all mug me. In the first ten minutes I’ve known him. He sees what he knows and knows what he sees and cannot find any systemic flaws in this arrangement.

More, when my landlord apologizes for the fact that I will occasionally view sex workers from my window. He has probably never thought for one single moment what that life would be like. And manners prevent him from assuming that I would have a view less conservative than this.

When my block is on the frayed edges between condemned meth-houses and the meticulous historic preservation rearview mirror. Spending money on the poor, or on the elimination of the systems that keep them there, is too difficult and the rewards too small. This architecture is where we keep our souls, anyway. The buildings, at least, do not talk back to us.

When people say ‘sir’ and saying ‘ma’am’ as though they are tokens of power. Gender rearing its head in every god-damned conversation. It’s how you pause a sentence politely.

Already the judgements I’ve made are slipping away. After a certain time immersed in water, you forget that there was even a word for it. The nuanced details of specific people in specific situations replace the over-arching two-dimensional picture.

And that’s why things are the way they are. I am coming to learn this. That is why inner change is the hardest thing, perhaps the most impossible thing. A violent rearrangement would be costlier, sure, in human life, but it would be infinitely more probable than expecting a community, any community, to fix itself.

Is this the kind of ‘culture shock’ that other people experience when they move somewhere new? Or am I just always easily irritated by, like, everything?