And then, with the sun setting on another hot day, we would ride back a few blocks to our neighborhood’s familiar skin—the language we knew, the songs we could rap along to, and the comfort that comes with not standing out. When I say it is a strange thing to live in close proximity to a world so vastly different than your own, I mean that it creates a longing within the imagination. You long for a place that you know only by its snapshots and not by the lives moving within them. It allowed me to fantasize, imagine a world where everyone was happy and no one ever hurt.
