For my gifted students, especially my fellow sporks
Mechelle Gilford
It isn’t polite to know too many things at once. To let history interrupt geography, to let geography wander into birds, to let birds become a question about migration patterns, musical notation, and mapping systems no one assigned you to think about.
It also isn’t polite to keep insisting there might still be meaning hidden inside the mess. To arrive carrying both the evidence and the lantern. It isn’t polite to keep arriving with connections from unrelated rooms – or to have read so widely, listened so closely, attended so completely that the rooms begin multiplying on their own.
Especially when someone is explaining attention to you while mistaking your meekness for madness. Mjúkr≭ Mashugana! Some minds move through the world like hallways with carefully numbered doors. Yours keeps finding hidden staircases.
So you learn the manners of narrowing. You learn to sit still inside the proper category even when the category itches. Behind it all, something else continues, a lemonlight mind, slanted and unlicensed, noticing connections it was never invited to notice. Fed, in part, by all the reading: the late-night kind, the sideways kind, the kind that seemed unrelated until suddenly it wasn’t.
Film becomes geography. Geography becomes sound. Sound becomes performance before anyone agrees on what is being performed. And still, it isn’t polite to refuse separation. To walk through the grocery store and see an archive instead of aisles, a theory of civilization instead of shelves.
To stop at a red light and see the birds on the telephone wires not as birds but as notes on a staff – a measure of something unwritten, unasked for, playing anyway in the key of an ordinary Blahsday. So you practice appearing simpler. You practice being one thing at a time the way people practice a language they suspect they will never fully belong to.
But underneath, nothing obeys.
Milk remains milk, but also memory spilled. Eggs remain eggs, but also origin stories. A book left open becomes a door left open. You cannot help but walk through. And the world continues anyway, without asking for your translation.
It isn’t polite to be a polymathyanna,
To keep seeing fracture and still insist on pattern. To witness the ordinary machinery of disappointment and continue, somehow, to notice the light falling through it. But it is, perhaps, the only way you ever learned to remain whole.