Waiting for an Email Reply

After Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Dear Professor Didi, My name is Gogo. I look forward to your response.

FW: Dear Professor Didi, Hope you’re well! I’m resending to you my last email in case you missed it. Sincerely, Gogo.

FW: Dear Professor Didi, Hope you had a great summer! It’s been three months since my last email and I have not heard from you. Please let me know if you have any questions regarding this matter, thank you! Best, Gogo.

FW: Dear Professor Didi, Hope you are well and had a great weekend! I’m following up with my previous emails. If I do not hear from you by the end of the week, I can assume you’ve forgotten.

That’s the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget.

Beckett objected to the casting of female actors. “Women don’t have prostates,” he said. Two years after his death, a judge allowed productions of female casts, however an objection from Becket’s representative had to be read before each performance.

Prostates do not exist in women. But they exist in Didi and Gogo. Does that mean Didi and Gogo exist? The prostate is a switch between urination and ejaculation. If the switch was forever stuck on urination, would man cease to exist?

What about hanging ourselves?

Hmmmm. It’d give us an erection.

An erection!

They say the last line in parenthesis, “[highly excited]” as if they are happy. Happy to hang themselves, to stop existing. Would death bring happiness?

There are no women in this play. I could not tell if they were happy to not exist. They had no mouths to tell me.

[giving up again] Nothing to be done.

The characters in Waiting for Godot have the privilege to give up more than once. And if they cannot get up, they are propped up. To continue, the sun cleaves itself a sliver at a time, a bare tree dresses itself three leaves at a time.

Hope deferred maketh the something sick.

Society identified the Coronavirus to an eastward origin with an Asian face, a mouth, stuck on the OPEN switch, maskless. Disease exists and is a race.

From the bottom of the stairs outside our apartment, I hear my mother chopping carrots against a wooden cutting board. The board was made by cutting down the tree, made naked, stripped bare. She opens the fridge for food to cut, to feed my needy mouth, to give me life. The fridge is alive, buzzing like a swarm of bees

like the swarm of people trying to protect themselves from a disease that exists as a race. The swarm digs a ditch.

May one enquire where His Highness spent the night?

In a ditch.

A ditch! Where?

Over there.

And they didn’t beat you?

Beat me? Certainly they beat me.

Gogo is certainly an Asian woman. But she does not exist, remember? This is why her emails went unanswered. Ignored, forgotten. There is nothing to remember, remember?

[Long silence.]

Silence as the last exhale, rising as a cloud of steam from the sink after my mother washes her hands in scalding hot water. Her skin has hardened, unfeeling.

Habit is a great deadener.

I eat the food, cut into bite-size pieces. My body grows but confines my existence, an existence my mother pulled out of her sinking ditch. She cut herself open so that I could be bite size. I am a sliver of my mother. I am her act of rebellion.

She taught me to organize fleeting sounds into words I write now to defer hopelessness, to lay permanent an objection to my nonexistence.

Tomorrow will come until it becomes today. Nothing to be done. Nothing you can do about it.