The Other Americans

by Laila Lalami

There was a mathematical elegance to faith like this: believe in God, follow His rules, and

you will be rewarded; disbelieve, disobey, and you will be punished.

My doubts were born that day. Over the years they grew, until one day they were all I had.

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

She considered my advice, took some of it and discarded some, but she always listened to what I had to say. I had forgotten what that was like. Being listened to,

The truth is that we were always different, from the beginning.

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.

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

That’s when I started to realize that some things couldn’t be explained. It was just chance. It couldn’t be argued with. There’s no reason or order to it.”

But my mother’s love was a war. It was fought every day for the sake of shaping me into somebody new, somebody better.

Her approval is a prison you do not wish to escape.

I could go on like this forever, imagining the other world that might have been.

What we had built together was so frail that it had collapsed at the first sign of trouble.

I come to understand that love was not a tame or passive creature, but a rebellious beast, messy and unpredictable, capacious and forgiving, and that it would deliver me from grief and carry me out of the darkness.