One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays

by Scaachi Koul

Your mom can stop a bullet from lodging in your heart. She can prop you up when you can’t. Your mom is your blood and bone before your body even knows how to make any.

And if you spend that much time thinking that something is going to happen to you, it’s likely because once in your life, something did, and you just don’t want it to happen again.

Being afraid of the world, of unknown beasts, only makes you feel alone. Sometimes you just need to get on the plane and hope nothing bad happens.

But it wasn’t real fear because I was with my mom. Nothing bad happens when you’re with your mom.

Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you’re in.

So much of immigration is about loss. First you lose bodies: people who die, people whose deaths you missed. Then you lose history: no one speaks the language anymore, and successive generations grow more and more westernized. Then you lose memory: throughout this trip, I tried to place people, where I had met them, how I knew them. I can’t remember anything anymore.

No one learns how to be mean at twenty-five. No one actually becomes a hardline racist in their thirties. These are beliefs and behaviours we inherit from our bloodlines, from the people who raised us, and the internet is just another way to put those beliefs to work.

But the only way to do better, to have better, is to lose pieces of what was. It’s inevitable that you can’t bring everything with you, like carrying water in your cupped hands from one river to another. There are too many cracks, and if you’re so eager to move, you’ll just have to get used to new water.