on “boyhood”

by Alaire Kanes

I don’t often drink tea, but when I do, I love to watch the tea bag steep in my mug. My cup always smells faintly of lemon—my roommates and I happen to store our mugs in the cupboard where we also store the lemon-scented super glue. Perhaps we’re being slowly poisoned, but the mugs remain in the cupboard, and the super glue stays in its place in the top left corner. It’s funny: I could get rid of the lemony scent, and its lethal capabilities, once and for all. But I choose to leave the tube there, untouched. Maybe I’m lazy, or maybe I just like the way the smell of sweet lemon reminds me of the unseen forces at play (chemical forces, perhaps).

As I write, I wonder: How has my life been changed by the presence of a bottle of superglue above a row of mugs? The what-ifs double by the second. What if my roommates and I find out in five years that we were ingesting unhealthy amounts of lemony chemicals each time we sipped a cuppa? What if I had had seven roommates instead of eight? What if I had decided to major in English instead of Anthropology? What if I had picked blue as my favorite color as a kid, instead of pink? How would my life be different...