The Secret Life of a Black Aspie by Anand Prahlad

Author:Anand Prahlad
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781602233225
Publisher: University of Alaska Press

The Big Yellow House

You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

When I got to college, I was like a black boat floating in a white ocean, like a black bird flying in a white sky with nowhere to land. I was so disoriented. There were too many islands, and I was getting lost in the waters between them. The first year I lived at home, and each time I traveled the gray stretch of asphalt and concrete on Interstate 95 to Richmond, I lost my focus. I lost myself. I wasn’t anywhere. My self was like a person in a movie whose hands and feet are tied to four horses, and the dictator gives the signal, and the soldier slaps the horses, and they bolt in different directions, and just keep on running. I knew the islands in the black sea. Granny’s and Mama’s houses, and the church down the road and through the woods, where I played the piano for the junior choir and taught Sunday school. But I had to learn the islands in the white sea. This building and that building. This department and that department.

I was feeling so overwhelmed and desperate. I didn’t even really know what college was. What were the rules? There was a cobblestone alley near the main campus plaza, and I would go there a lot to get away from the rivers of people rushing all around me. The alley was full of old spirits and shadows that danced like reeds in the wind. It was filled with separate paths. Each path went up and down differently, had a different temperature, a different wind, and made different music when I stepped on it. I closed my eyes and tried to walk from one end of the alley to the other without changing paths. I could hear the echoes of my footsteps vibrating between the buildings on either side. I was sitting in the alley one day, holding my hand a fraction of an inch away from the sunshine and wondering, How did I get here? What is this place? No one had told me anything about college. Mama and Daddy didn’t know anything to tell me.

I would look out from the alley, or the top window of a building, and see all the people going places and doing things. They were going to classes and to the library. They were going to restaurants and parties and meetings and clubs. They were going home and coming back and going home again. They were throwing Frisbees and catching buses and riding bicycles. There were tides of talking and laughter, of heels on sidewalks and asphalt. I was seeing them like Frankenstein peeping around a corner.

What I really wanted to do when I got out of high school was go and live on a commune. That was more where my heart was, but I was afraid of letting go of everything I knew. Guest speakers had come to our high school for a cultural program, and they told us all about their commune.

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