The Other Americans

by Laila Lalami

But now that she was trimming fat from my carnitas, she might as well have been trimming joy from my life.

For my mother, things were forever not the way they were supposed to be.

My mother had to leave many traditions behind and the more time passed, the more they mattered to her.

I was struck silent by the view. It was a cold, clear day in December, and there was snow on the peaks of the Little San Bernardino Mountains. The valley was a blanket of high grass and mesquite and yucca, slowly warming up under the morning sun, and after the road dipped and rose and turned, we reached the first grove of Joshua trees. How hard the believers make it to get into heaven, I thought, when they have all this right here.

I lost a year, maybe a year and a half, like that, just drifting, trying to fill the hole in me that I thought the war had left, until I realized it was the same hole I had gone into the Marines to fill in the first place.

“Okay. You were right.” A meaningless concession to avert an escalation.

All I know is that life is short. Without realizing it, I had been traveling down the road from birth to death with the wrong companion. But

Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.

How strange the work of memory, I thought. What some people remembered and others forgot.

Meanwhile, the civilians who died in American wars would receive only silence. National memory was built from such erasures. But private memory was nothing but a struggle against erasure.