The Other Americans

by Laila Lalami

How hard the believers make it to get into heaven, I thought, when they have all this right here.

We were like a thrift-store tea set, there was always one piece missing.

I had noticed this before about Americans—they always want to take action, they have a hard time staying still, or allowing themselves to feel uncomfortable emotions—so

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.

Meanwhile, the civilians who died in American wars would receive only silence. National memory was built from such erasures.

Grief demanded surrender. I had to let go. I had to learn how to live with just the memories, nothing else.