Coexistence: Stories

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

I’m working on a term paper on forgiveness. It’s about how the government uses phrases like “sad chapter” to describe the colonial past, as though we could put it behind us like a page in a book. Most books I read stay with me, linger in my mind, changing the architecture of my thoughts. Colonial governance is a problem of interpretation, then, I intend to argue. The past is read so as to be annihilated. That is my thesis statement. For whom is violence sad, and for whom is it a brutal inheritance? I write.

“A beautiful sentence is a reason to live. We write because we want to keep living.”

I thought of the Louise Glück lines: “It was a time / governed by contradictions, as in / I felt nothing and / I was afraid.” In the passenger seat of Rachel’s car, I felt nothing and I was afraid. I felt afraid and I was nothing.