my father and i were drinking orange juice at 

two thirty in the morning when he turned to me and said,

“i never taught you that you could be anything you

wanted to be because the truth is that you can’t,”

and i decided he was right when i realized i was too

right-brained to work a nine-to-five job and that i’d rather

destroy a computer and call it art than create one and 

call it science.

 

but maybe he was only thinking about the big picture,

and by now i’ve realized that the big picture is never

the most important and that the small scribblings that

mainly go unnoticed matter the most and i thought

back to when a tenth grade teacher had asked me a

simple question and expected a simple response,

 

and while i had given her a real answer, she claimed it 

to be unrealistic and the corner of her lip twitched as she

tried to suppress a laugh, but i wasn’t laughing because

what’s so wrong about saying that, “maybe i want to be 

your favorite constellation?” because it’s true —

 

and, “i want to be the goosebumps on your arms when you 

hear your favorite song performed live. i want to be the aching in your 

ribs after you’ve laughed too hard, your favorite Sunday dinner,

a constant reminder that you are beautiful and that you are

kind and that you don’t need anybody else to make you happy.

i want to be compassion. i want to be sympathy, treachery,

creativity. i want to be the reason you wake up in the middle 

of the night without really understanding why. i want to be

the question, an answer, a hundred possibilities.”

 

she asked me what i wanted to be, and i told her i wanted

to be everything — and maybe other people don't know how

to feel the same way that i know how to feel,  and maybe that's

because we spend so much time teaching kids how to compute

and to quote instead of how to express and emote and i find that 

very disappointing.