“Although the river and its people share the past, on this afternoon, the burden seems unevenly placed. The man whose socks are drying on the concrete can rest in peace knowing that his story has ended.”
What am I supposed to do? I want you to tell me. I want you to tell me what am I supposed to do. Before you answer, I’ll tell you my story, and I’ll tell you hers. And then, I … Read More
“…he could never have seen the Haitian man as a human being with a history, dreams and aspirations. He had been trained to see him simply as the object of his violence.”
This binary between “school” and “cool” is something even my own parents, haters
of dim lighting and monthly contacts prescriptions, acknowledge as well, if only implicitly.
I sit and breathe and try to recall my whole life. I now sit serenely in the brush by this shouldering road. It winds tightly through the Peloponnesian town of Megalopolis, where I sit, through the pink stucco homes clinging staccato to the high side of the mountain our bus, heaving, climbed. Rapt speech in the restaurant behind is mere chatter.
I was seventeen. A senior second semester saturated with drugs, alcohol and bad decisions written off as “youth” had ended in a hospital bed on prom night, and, subsequently, in daily, forced AA meetings. I’d thought I was on top of the world: going to an Ivy League school, surrounded by friends, graduating top of my class.
“To ask people to tell what’s suspicious and unusual is to expose innocent individuals to a system that constantly profiles and projects fear, to always assume the worst.”
There are always eggs at my house. Well, I’ll clarify that—there are always eggs somewhere around my house. Usually the hens are obedient and lay in their nest boxes, but they love to hide their work from us. Occasionally we’ll pull hay bales from the barn to find a cache of eggs tucked in a corner, like the work of a lazy Easter bunny. Sometimes they have been there for years; when we were younger, my siblings and I would throw them against trees deep in the woods, where their sulfur was overwhelmed by the smell of pine.
