Luz's Questionnaire

I live in Seattle, Washington. And... Alaska. And... lots of other places. I travel a lot for work, but Seattle is where the most consistent work is. It's rainy, and cold, and humid, but I like the places I can go, and I like the resources I have here. I've got a permanent setup in Seattle, so that's where I "live". With the kind of work I do, it took a few years, but I was able to buy a workshop and build a sort of cottage attached to / next to it. Well, more next to it than anything, so there's less chance of it burning down if a fire starts in the shop. The house is alright- I built it to my own needs, so it's small, 'cause I like it that way. It's got a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen. And it's nice and secure. It's got its own solar panels and a generator so I can keep it off the city's power. I decorate it with little things I've gotten from my work travels, to show I've been there, since sometimes- it's not like I forget, exactly, but I just don't remember, you know?

I do gig welding work. It's not really how I like to use my skills, but it pays really well. My body's taken kind of a beating from the long hours and how physically taxing the work is, so I spend some of the money on good healthcare, and some of it on comfort stuff. Some of it goes to bills, some of it goes to transport, some to food. The usual stuff. But what I spend most of that massive salary on is my own projects, the stuff I work on at home, in my shop. That's how I really like to use what I can do. 

I want to make inventions so good the whole world will have to see and acknowledge them. I want to make something everyone will know about, all across the world. I want to show everyone what I saw when I glimpsed the Glory and all that is illuminated in its light. The images are still burnt into my mind but I can't remember them anymore even though they're still there like wounds I cannot see and scars I cannot feel. I want to show them because I am still chasing that feeling, that glory of comprehension of the things just out of reach! Maybe I can show them if I just try hard enough. Maybe I can reach that light again. I want to put form to it.

Finding out what my real name was. I was called Luke until then. That was never my real name. It always felt like it didn't fit right, even before I learned it wasn't the name my real parents gave me. Learning my real name, the one I was born with, validated everything that felt wrong about my life. Everything that WAS wrong about it. It helped me become something other than what I was and it felt so good, to shed that identity like a butterfly struggling out of its cocoon. I was weak and wobbly at first but spreading my wings and escaping it was the best thing that's ever happened to me. Even seeing the Glory and its light can't compare- though it does come close. I wouldn't be who I am without that name. I'd still be Luke. I wouldn't fit in my own skin.

One of my bosses, Jack. He's a good dude, pretty strict about the quality of work his crew does, but that's good, 'cause the work we do needs to be done well or there could be catastrophic consequences. He's good company while not on the clock, too. I don't keep in touch with him much outside of work, but it's always good to see him when I go back to Alaska every year. Besides, we spend enough time with each other on the months-long gigs. I don't think either of us wants to see each other before the next round.

Then there's my favorite coworker right now, Vika. She's a scrappy kid from Russia. Don't know much about her, but I'm the only one there that knows Russian, and her English isn't great, so we work together a lot. She's got a good sense of humor.

My little brother, Greg, he's whom I'm closest to. He's the only one in my family I'm in touch with anymore. He's always been good to me, not like his parents. We don't get to see each other in person much, since he's still at home, working on his degree. I can't blame him, with how the economy is going; his parents are stable, and he gets along with them well enough to not get in fights. He knows what they did, though. I don't know if that powder keg is going to go off any time soon or what, but I'll be glad to not be around if or when it happens. We still text and call almost every day, though sometimes I miss the notifications because I'm doing work. He always tries to make sure that I'm keeping myself together, eating, sleeping, that kind of thing. He's always been more put together than me, but I've never really been envious of him. Just proud. 

When I was born, I was the child of Mexican immigrants who did not cross the USA-Mexican border legally. I never got the chance to know them; they were deported by ICE when I was about a year old, before I could form memories. Because I was born in the United States, I was a citizen, but they weren't. This meant that they weren't allowed to stay, but I was. I was taken from them and put in the foster system, where I was adopted by a white couple a few months later. They renamed me, though not on paper, and raised me like I was their own.

I wasn't. And they knew that. And I knew that, pretty early. It wasn't hard to figure out when I looked so different from them. I learned what "adoption" was when I was six or seven, I think. One of my classmates told me I was, and I didn't know what it meant. I don't remember how they said it, if they were curious or trying to help or maybe malicious. But I looked it up- the couple had told me that if I ever needed to find out what a word meant, I could always use a dictionary. And I knew that they were right when I learned what it meant. I just didn't know what being adopted.... meant. I didn't know I had been taken from my real parents. I didn't know that I had the right to an entire culture and community that I was being kept from. I told them I knew, instead of them telling me. They were pretty shocked that I had brought it up, and they told me that it didn't mean anything, that I was still theirs, that they loved me like I had been born to them.

They proved themselves wrong when my little brother was born.

I was there at the birth, and the way the woman that adopted me screamed was the most horrible thing I had ever heard, worse than the names that the kids at school started to call me when they picked them up from their family or their family's friends or the media the people around them watched. I'd heard them before, too. They didn't hold a candle to how much it hurt to listen to her in pain and not be able to help. I was nine. My brother was born, pale-pink and tiny and wrinkled and perfect, and he cried and I cried partly because it was finally over and partly because his parents had told me that I was going to be a big brother and I had formed this idea of him in my head that was definitely not what he actually was, and then partly because he WAS my little brother and I had already been determined to love him from the moment I was told he would exist.

They didn't love me any less, after that. They didn't treat me any worse than they did before Greg was born. I know that kids can feel that way, when new siblings are born, that they can feel like they're being neglected. But his parents had friends and family to help with Greg and with things around the house, so even if Greg needed attention, they never neglected my needs. They still picked me up from school, and made good food for me, and played with me. Everything a parent should do, they did.

They just loved him more.

I could see it in their eyes when they looked at him, when they interacted with him. I couldn't begrudge him that they loved him more than they loved me, even at that age. I loved him too. He was my little brother, and I would do absolutely anything for him. I did research on what brothers should do, and I helped my parents by taking care of him and playing with him, and they praised me for being responsible and helpful and a good brother. And I was happy about that. But they promised they loved me as much as they loved a child of their blood before they really understood what it was to have a child of their blood, and so they made themselves into liars. I wasn't of them. I wasn't like them. I was theirs, but differently than Greg was theirs. Something acquired, instead of something made. Something other. 

I didn't understand what any of that meant at the time. I just knew that it felt strange, to slowly come to the realization that I was standing on the outside, looking in. That little by little, the feelings I had at school, that I was different from the- all white- kids there, followed me home, until the two places felt indistinguishable, despite the difference in the quality of care shown to me between the two. That they never used vile invectives against me didn't seem to matter as long as I felt like a cuckoo in a bird's nest.

And then as I grew, I came to understand the depth and breadth of what was being denied to me. The food, the language, the sight of people with the same features as my own, the belonging. There was no place in my hometown that I belonged because there was nobody else like me there. I told the people I thought of as my parents this and they told me that they loved me and that I belonged with them and they looked nervous. And things changed. Or, more like, they suddenly and uncomfortably became aware of the same glass that I had known for years stood between us. They said they didn't understand how I could be unhappy, that they didn't know what they could do about my isolation. But they were comfortable. They could afford to continue to be comfortable, in a world they had never left, in ways they had worn into their lives like ruts in ill-maintained roads. They didn't know because they didn't think to know, because they didn't try to know. They saw my otherness for what it was and they couldn't go back to not seeing it, but they didn't look any farther, either. I became the problem.

It was a quiet detachment, a subtle separation, that they performed from that day onwards. Outwardly things were the same- my physical needs were taken care of, and my emotional needs were at least performatively catered to. But the warmth they showed me from my early childhood was gone by the time I was nearing the end of highschool. My brother noticed, but he didn't know what happened or how to fix it. He refused to be separated from me, which I'll always be grateful for. His parents didn't give him grief for it, just me. I wasn't an appropriate influence anymore, with how cold things were between myself and them. They, at least, didn't use racial slurs or vile invectives, like my peers at school. They didn't have to. Nitpicking at my appearance, telling me to be careful whom I associated with, telling me that what I looked like or said was inappropriate.

I found my birth certificate with my real name on it when I was seventeen and I cried for days. The betrayal of knowing they had kept my own name from me, that they had twisted what I was supposed to be into what they thought would fit in, hurt like my heart had been carved out of my chest and eaten by them in front of me. 

I was gone to a trade school as soon as I turned eighteen, three days after graduation. I had already been accepted and used my allowance for a P.O. box the school could send the letters and forms to so the couple wouldn't know where to find me. I left Greg my email and phone number and left without telling his parents where I was going. I don't know if they know I'm alive. I really don't care.

I have never been in love.

I've had crushes. I develop crushes really easily, actually. But I've had a hard time getting close to anyone for pretty much my whole life. Even after leaving the place where I grew up, it wasn't like I had practice, and making friends as an adult is a lot harder in general- but especially when you've basically never had a real friend in your entire life. Therapy helped a bit, and I get along with my coworkers well. But crushing and acquaintanceships.... those are different than forming lasting and meaningful emotional relationships. And I only mistook a crush for falling in love once. Not that it ended badly or anything, but my feelings just fizzled out after I realized I didn't really know him at all.