Even Honeysuckle is a Just a Weed

I drenched the cold, cheese-less scrambled eggs in off-brand ketchup and shook the life out of the salt shaker until I saw thin, translucent granules floating in the thick red sea. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know how to fucking cook. How was a 13-year-old boy expected to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for both himself and his schizophrenic mother?

“Mom!” I would yell from the kitchen, hoping for a response since that meant she was at least inside.

Back then, my mom was taking her clothes off in our front lawn a lot. She’d sit there topless in her underwear, shouting through a paper towel tube that the CIA was in our house and watching her. Soon enough, some neighbor would call the cops, and the police would stop by for a few minutes. Forget being embarrassed that we were, quite literally, airing out all of our dirty laundry for the neighbors to bear witness to - I also didn’t want to see all of that.

My older brother Khalil and I grew up with the kind of instability that makes kids go one of two directions: become honor roll students or pick up a bad habit. I guess I fell under the latter half because I was smoking weed every chance I got and only attending class to avoid summer school. It’s not like the Detroit public school system gave a shit about me. And to make sure I passed during the year, I tried to sit next to someone with highwater pants or a science olympiad sticker on their laptop during quizzes.

But that was then, and this was now. There was no more time spent attempting to cook with half-rotten groceries and an odd assortment of condiments and spices. When I turned 14, I moved in with Khalil, who was 8 years older than me. With the change of scenery, I found myself thinking about my fucked-up childhood less and less. Khalil had finished welding school and was doing well for himself. He brought us gas station chicken tenders at least once a week and had an endless selection of frozen dinners, even the name-brand ones. Sure, his apartment wasn’t in a “good” part of town and the landlord sure liked to perform “random” checks on the place. But we had our routine. And there was power in routine.

Even though Khalil was a good brother, Ok Whitaker was the only person I really confided in. He lived in the same neighborhood as Khalil, and I always saw him outside shooting hooks alone in his driveway. He went by the name “Ok,” and that was all anyone at school ever knew him as. I guess it must have been his real, government name because it was always the name called on roll-call.

Ok still had this childlike wonder about him and had fiery orange-red hair that made him stand out in.a sea of heads in the school hallway. He drew with chalk in his driveway and used binoculars to watch birds in our neighborhood. He lived with his grandma, who was rarely home.

Nothing really mattered when we hung out. He had an extra bike with a shaky front wheel that he let me borrow, and we’d race to the area behind the old grocery store, where there was a sorry-looking walking path behind a large wooden fence. In our suburban hell, it was the only green space we had, and we made it ours. Honeysuckle bushes grew on some vines against the fence with the resilience of a sidewalk flower. There was a small opening where yellow and purple wildflowers grew timidly in the spring and multicolored leaves piled up softly in the fall. During periods of heavy rainfall, a giant puddle would form. It was almost big enough to be a pond but would never quite get there. Somehow, both of us felt a strange connection to that puddle. We always held out a small ounce of hope that one day there'd be a rainstorm large enough to transform it completely. Of course, there never was.

One day in particular stands out to me in my memory and, for a while, made me want to crawl into a deep, dark hole and never come out. It was one of those long days in July where the heat was even too much for most of the wild animals. Though people tended to associate Michigan with snowstorms and lakeside breeze, summers in Detroit were anything but pleasant.

It was the summer I turned 15 and grew 5 inches, catching up to Ok, who still had a couple over me. I was still far enough away from adulthood to get away with being irresponsible but old enough to know the sad reality of the world around us.

“Hey CJ - you think our puddle will dry up completely by tomorrow?” Ok asked me, his normally carrot-red hair darkened by sweat and plastered to his head. When he squinted to block out the sunlight, his freckles inched closer together, forming what reminded me of an abstract painting.

I stumbled over my words, caught on the way he described the puddle as ours. My words came out as a clusterfuck of random thoughts strung together. “Maybe. Unless it storms tonight. I love summer storms. Except when there are tornados. And I hope it doesn’t rain on our way back. I hate biking in the rain.”

Ok walked over to the fence, where the honeysuckle vine was thriving. He grabbed a honeysuckle flower from the bush and showed me how to get the most minuscule drop of sugar from it. When the butterflies danced around in my stomach, it felt like I was infested with roaches. I wanted to drink something to kill them off, but nobody ever calls pest control for beautiful things with wings. Still, I knew I wasn’t supposed to be feeling this way about a boy.

Hamza, the CIA is watching, you know. You need to be careful. They don’t care about protecting people like us. My mother’s words popped into my head, and I shook them off.

“Try it,” Ok continued, holding one of the delicate flowers out for me to grab.

The flower was close enough to my nose for me to catch a whiff of its scent. It smelled like a mix of orange peels and the flower section of the grocery store. It wasn’t strong, but it was persistent. I leaned in more and our eyes locked. Ok moved in closer. I could see the brown flecks in his green eyes and the hair on his upper lip. Before I knew it, our lips were touching. It was several seconds before I finally pulled away, looking down at the ground.

My head was full of chaos that night. It did end up storming, and I laid in my bed while the thunder cracked, thinking I was surely going to hell. My mother’s voice popped into my head every few minutes reminding me of the ever-present threat of the CIA. I skipped dinner that night and instead did a lot of Google searching, trying to figure out if what I was feeling was normal. Ok and I never explicitly talked about what happened. Though I panicked all weekend about what would happen at school on Monday between us, everything was normal. We were still best friends, eating lunch together and AirDropping random pictures to people in the cafeteria, laughing hysterically. It happened again exactly three more times in the same spot, on Ok’s 16th birthday that October, one unremarkable day the following summer, and the day he left for good.

When Ok told me he was moving a few months into senior year, I didn’t speak to him for 2 whole weeks.

“You’re leaving me,” I said through tears, shocked at the sudden flood of emotions.

“My grandma can’t pay the rent anymore," Ok said, his face turning bright red. "We're moving in with my aunt. She lives in Indiana."

Despite all of the awful things that had happened to me, somehow that day was still one of the worst days of my entire life.

My childhood was full of embarrassment about where I came from. I guess now that I’m 18, not much has changed. When Khalil got married and started his family, I became a background character in my own life. I got a job at the gas station near our place near the end of senior year. Sometimes I wonder where Ok is and if he ever thinks about me. Even though he moved school districts in the middle of our final year of high school, his senior portrait still made the cut for the yearbook.

"CJ, you got mail!" Khalil tossed the hardcover book onto my bed one afternoon.

I remember flipping through the pages nonchalantly and then feeling my whole body pause when I saw his face. It was like my blood stopped moving, my lungs stopped expanding, and my thoughts stopped forming. His goofy grin and face full of freckles lit up the page so much I almost forgot the pictures were black and white. The deep ache of nostalgia hit me like my very first fall onto the concrete from a moving bike.

I knew he was gone. In the small world I lived in, the possibility of traveling to Indiana was about as likely as flying to Japan. But now that I'm 18 and done with school, I've had time to think about what all of this means for me. All of the feelings for Ok. All of the feelings I never had for Myriah or Clarissa or Emma no matter how hard I tried. All of the nights I spent beating myself up and telling myself I was wrong for feeling this way.

I've thought about my mom, who has been a resident of the state hospital for over 3 years now. Does she ever think about me? Is she any different now? Khalil didn’t believe in visiting mental hospitals due to some kind of weird superstition he had, so we never went. Would my mom be disappointed in these feelings that I've had and still have and may always have? Or would she understand what it's like to be judged?

I liked to think she understands what it's like to be different. I like to think that she's proud of me. Sometimes I pretend that her warnings about the CIA watching me were just code words for her fears about society not accepting me for who I am. That she was warning me because she knew how cruel the world could be and wanted to protect me. Maybe someday I'll see her again. Maybe someday I'll see Ok again. For now, I'll go to sleep at night knowing that feeling something for as beautiful of a human being as Ok could never be wrong. Indiana sure is lucky.