ORIGINS: We won’t lie, our minds wandered off the point. We should have stuck to whales and the spiral shells that house their many-legged guests, but killer whales and panda bears share the same colors, and we couldn’t resist.
An orca and a panda aren’t all that different. Both are black and white. I could borrow either name. But orcas come with their own night sky; they come with their own ocean. White with a thousand broken waves, and a single holdout standing its ground. If I hadn’t already chosen, that is where I would put my heart. I would entrust it to that lone wave. But I refuse to let somebody else rule over me. I will be a panda, my own full moon. And if there are black holes; if some nights the crescents, of what is already done and what is to come, linger to take one or a thousand bites of me, I will learn to live with the bite marks.
I hate envy, nothing has ever made me feel so alone or so empty inside. Without a single drop of blood, much less the ocean I still long for. We have the same colors. Black. And white. Why couldn’t pandas like me have an ocean too? A piece of the puzzle. A white wave, just one, that would have let us belong, and complete the sea. What do we have instead? Hunger. For bamboo stalks. Long like the tails of shooting stars. All we have are wishes we don’t know how to shoot into the sky. And if there was fairness in the world, at least orcas would envy us those. But there is not.
I don’t know why sometimes the words that come out of my mouth are more white than black and why other times they are more black than white. Why sometimes there is more good and other times there is more bad. All I know is that none of those words have ever moved me to tears. Not even when I feel trapped inside a black hole, after having done my best to light up the moon and failed, again, to believe the lies I told myself. My tears never fall. Not even when I watch my truths swim away from me, hoping to reach a faraway shore. Someone else’s lips, and their promise of life. Those waves crash back into the sea, unheard, and so too do my tears. As if they had never been.
I believe that a panda and an orca can be friends. I already know that they can coexist; I am living proof of it. I have touched a mirror, and my reflection didn’t bite my hand off. All the parts I keep to myself, the ones that are white where I show black and black where I speak white, they have touched, and the smile on my face hasn’t gone anywhere. The animal I am when others are around and the animal I am when I keep my own company know where they stand, that both of them have a purpose in my life. And even though one of them owes more to the other, both have a place, their own side of the mirror, and they are happy with it. I know that they are happy, because my smile hasn’t had a reason to show its teeth yet.