Kidnapping Maya

Expectations surround me like a never-ending, vast whirlwind. Growing up in the suburbs of Virginia with a name like Maya Angelou Robinson isn’t easy, especially now in February. Everyone always expects something great of me, like I’m some kinda Poet Laureate or something. Momma’s always goin’ on and on about my future being a writer or a poet, always something to do with writing.

Ever since she read “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou, things have never been the same. It’s always “… I walk into a room just as cool as you please” and “… they try so much but they can’t touch my inner mystery.” Yet it never fails to end with “… ‘Cause I’m a woman, phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, that’s me.” If I’ve heard it a thousand times, I’ve heard it once. Why can’t people just let it die?

Am I naught but the mediocre, shallow essence of one of the greatest African-American poets alive? I can’t even sing in the shower right, let alone be compared to one of the most outstanding poetic gurus of the English language and the world. I’ve read her collections multiple times throughout my short-lived existence of fifteen years. Her words, her syntax, her stamina proves that she truly deserves to be crowned as one of the best, but me, that’s a whole ‘nother sonnet for you there.

Speaking of sonnets and writing, I never wanted to be a writer. Don’t get me wrong, I love Maya Angelou, Edgar Allan Poe and the likes, especially Lord George Byron of the Romantic Era, but writing just isn’t my forte. I’ve tried to explain this to Momma on more than one occasion, but her set mind won’t budge. It’s like a huge boulder that’s laughing ‘cause you’re trying to move it with a rusty, child’s toy shovel over a huge, wretched cliff and the result is always the same: utterly impossible.

At least I have one person who understands me: my Geometry teacher, Ms. Emily Jane Austen. She’s experienced a myriad of things, some similar, if not the exact same things I’m dealing with, and other things that should be left unsaid but because I have an over-analytical mind, we converse about taboo topics until the cows come home and the chickens fly over the silvery, white moon. And ironically, math is one of my worse subjects.