i miss fried catfish

It looks like my mom and her new boyfriend are walking down the street towards the dog and me. Well, the couple walking down the street doesn’t look anything like them, they’re even different ethnicities. But the silhouette aligns—a petite woman and her tall lover. This equation is done over thousands of times. Each time it looks like my mom and her new boyfriend in the distance.

They look past me when we’re forced to intersect. I smile, instead of averting my eyes, because this woman resembles my mother in height and nothing else. But they each look past me and continue on. 

I feel stupid. 

It’s like the time I posted on social media about being a feminist. I mean I’m always one, I don’t even shave my armpits, but this time I actually said it beyond signifying. Then all these middle aged women lectured me—like how my fourth grade teacher did, when my friend and I skipped recess to sit in the classroom. Before our teacher said anything, I apologized. Before she could even lecture, I apologized, for myself and not my friend. It didn’t exempt me from the scolding. I felt so ashamed. It hadn’t mattered that we stayed in for recess, though that broke a rule, but we had lied and said we were allowed to. That was the issue.

I don’t think there was any punishment besides the talking to. I was on good terms with the teacher, I would stay back at recess chatting with her. She told me to stop pulling my ponytail taut because it destroyed the hair follicles. She told me she loved the local soul food restaurant my family frequented. My dad said, What does that white lady know about soul food? I was nine, and I didn’t know food could even have a soul or a lineage or why my teacher liking the same restaurant as us was remarkable.

I guess I knew my mom loved soul food, a lot more than any of my friends' moms probably loved soul food. Like that scene in Beauty Shop, the Queen Latifah movie, where Andie MacDowell is a grown woman and has never had soul food and she discovers it the same time she discovers her self worth. Maybe Midwestern white people just don’t know soul food, or aren’t supposed to.

So my dad got us, the family, soul food once a week. Eventually, I even got tired of the fried catfish I had loved so much and told my teacher about, when she said she loved it, too. Then my mom left and the soul food place changed names and enough time passed that I could desperately crave the catfish I had grown so sick of.

But in the end, all we got from the teacher in fourth grade was a talking to, though it felt deeper. Did teachers ever really yell at me? No. I was quiet and obedient and studious. They liked me. Then suddenly years passed, and I don’t have teachers anymore and my mom left and the soul food place changed names and middle aged women are lecturing me again, but now there is no pretense of fondness.

The social media lectures brought back that deep seated shame from something that had never been a big deal. Plus the fourteen-year-old boys got really mad at my feminist video. That was a funny bright spot. Sad for the youth of today drifting towards conservatism, I guess, but funny to make fourteen year old boys mad on the internet. Each year, a new crop of boys enters fourteen and their pastime becomes getting mad at the internet. Feminism threatens them but they’re children, burgeoning towards manhood, but still not there. They may never get there. They hate women. They devote their time to hating women on a screen who have feminist beliefs, even the ones who don’t. Even the ones who shave every inch and prim and pamper and say it’s for themselves and it could be, partially, but all their desires fall in line with the patriarchy, so how true are those desires? It’s like internet day one, to deviate from a norm and receive blowback. 

I don’t know why I posted the video. I felt stupid, the same way I do when this couple looks past me. The woman looks nothing like my mom and nothing like those who had lectured me and the man has not been fourteen for a long time. I feel stupid all the same.

I mean, sometimes I look right past people too, like you can’t even dignify them with your sight. It’s this rude uppity thing, but really it’s just insecurity. I can’t speak on that couple that resembled my mom and her boyfriend, maybe they are the uppity sort—they were walking in the direction of the fancy restaurant adjoining my moms empty loft. But for me, it’s usually an insecurity thing. Like I don’t think I deserve to see the world.

This one time I was walking the dog, and the dog park is connected to a real park, too, with playsets and benches and all. So these two kids don’t really care about the swing or the slide or the merry-go-round, had there been one—my childhood park had a merry-go-round—but not this one. I used to ignore all that equipment to stay back and talk to my teacher at recess. It’s summer vacation now though, so these kids are just at the playground by way of a parent and not a teacher. They ignore everything built for them. They just sprawl out on the grass, the same grass all the dogs poop on, and wait for someone to walk by so they could yell, Help! I’m dying!

Well I looked right past them, just kept walking. My brother and I used to play the same game at the pool, to yell over and over that we were drowning, and no one came to save us. It was part of the game. You had a reason to be indignant. There was something thrilling about death because we didn’t understand it. It was alluring. It was worthy of giggles and screams because we didn’t understand it. No one had died yet.

But now I know all about death, as much as any living person can. So I just walk right past the kids like I don’t see or hear them. Like their game is beneath me. So in that instance it wasn’t really insecurity, I was practicing at being an uppity city sort of person. I mean that was why I felt the need to notice that dogs poop on this grass they’re playing on. It’s grass. It doesn’t belong to anyone. We all stake a claim. 

I used to walk my dog in broad daylight in a suburb where I could look however I wanted. Now I walk my dog in a city where I have an irrational fear that I’ll run into someone I’ve matched with on a dating app. I didn’t use the apps in the suburbs because it all felt too small, and then I moved to the city. The lesbian dating-app pool is so small, half of what it showed me was girls from high school, who remain trapped in that suburb. Maybe not half. But a not-insignificant amount. I don’t match with any of them.

You can filter for women on your profile and signify that you’re a lesbian through that. You don’t have to don unshaven armpits or get a septum piercing or anything. That doesn’t mean you’re exempt from men matching you, though. Which is annoying, painfully so, like when a woman matches with you so you can be the third for her and her boyfriend. Why? It insults me. It insults my lesbianism. Your boyfriend is not my exception. You are not my exception. But it hurts the girl, right? What girl suggests that? If a girl suggests that, she hates her boyfriend, and they need to break it off. If a boy suggests that, they still need to break it off, he hates her. Why would I go to bed with two people who hate each other? 

If I ran into those couples, or the men, while walking my dog, I would probably avert my gaze. I could stare them down and assert dominance, which is what I would like to say I’d do, but I would avert my gaze.

If I ran into a woman I had matched with, that’s the real prize. That’s why I can’t go out looking however I want anymore. My friend used to say, You never know who you’ll run into, her whole life is this put together, influencer-esque day in my life pastiche. The outfits, the little ablutions. I’ll never be like her, I don’t have the will. People are always approaching her. She’s beautiful.

Sometimes I try, though. Just in case those lesbian dating-app profiles spring to life. I feel stupid when I dress up, and I feel stupid when I don’t, I felt stupid when my fourth grade teacher lectured me, I felt stupid when my mom left, I felt stupid when I declared my feminism, I felt stupid when I smiled at the couple who did not smile back. I pretty much always feel stupid, and I can’t escape it. Is that what dying feels like? This huge stupidity no one can escape. Help. I’m dying and everyone is looking past me. Help.

Paige Mattison is a writer from Michigan who walks her dog three times a day and thinks exclusively in stream of consciousness rambles.