servitude
When I moved out for college my grandmother bought me a tray. She laid it next to everything else she could fit in a small, baby-sized basket: tea towels and wooden spoons and spices that had never seen the inside of a box. “This is for cleaning and these are for when you cook.” And nothing about the tray. Until. She lifts it up and puts it between us. It is an ugly tray. Hard white printed plastic. The kind you would only ever use for yourself to prevent a spill, the kind meant to be found years later in the back of a damp cupboard yellowed and covered in ring stains.
When am I going to use a tray? “It’ll make it easier to take a cup of tea from the kitchen to your room.”
Why would I do that? It’s just me. Would moving to a different timezone would compel me to change how my cup of tea travels to my bedside? “Well, you could have people over sometime.” And there. The preparation to serve. To carry a sheet of plastic in anticipation of Some Guest, Sometime graciously accepting a cup of tea off it. The expectation of servitude — to follow me in to a place supposed to be my own.
There is something about serving. Something that seems like it loves but only just craves acceptance. A game that stops being fun past thirteen, when it is no longer shy role-play but head-bent duty. Something that says: serve but do not touch. Something I should neatly fit in to my suitcase to carry with me, something to lay itself flat against my life and tuck itself in to bed next to me.
Could leaving servitude behind be something like not packing a hard white plastic tray? But then. What would satisfy my primal need for acceptance? For tender love and touch — for the stolen glance and thumb-brushing-thumb that kept her satiated all these years? To serve and receive a quiet love. A love that says: this is not love, not really. This is not anything. This is just a glance and a nod. This is me lifting a a plate-of-something off the thing you hold. That rush from a glance and a nod and not-anything-really that warms everything — where do I get that now, refusing servitude?
And then it repeats itself. The cycle. Of me not wanting to be her but then understanding her and slowly becoming her. A hard white ugly tray becoming an extension of me, resting on the tips of my fingers, back bent, serving and serving and serving. Until I can give it to someone else.
I left with the tray-sized hole in my carry-on resoundingly empty. It rests between us — given and left. Until servitude becomes something else.