Patron Saints of Nothing

by Randy Ribay

“One thing dies, and another is born.

Everyone acts like seventeen-year-olds who don’t have their career path mapped out are wasting their lives.

if people don’t speak out when something wrong is happening—wherever in the world—they’re helping whoever is committing that wrong by allowing it to happen.

It’s a sad thing when you map the borders of a friendship and find it’s a narrower country than expected.

When you grow up in a country like the United States, you’re constantly told it’s the greatest place in the world. But then you go somewhere else one day and find out that bathroom doors like this exist, and you start to question everything.

Sometimes I feel like growing up is slowly peeling back these layers of lies.

There are moments when sharing silence can be more meaningful than filling a space with empty chatter.

“Maybe you haven’t developed a passion yet because you’ve spent your entire life doing what others wanted you to do.”

Isn’t there some sense of right and wrong about how human beings should be treated that applies no matter where you live, no matter what language you speak?

“If you have something to say, you should say it. If you are to figure things out, you can’t hide from them. Silence will not save you.”

“Those who are in power do not like the truth to be known if it does not make them look good.

Surely the air your lungs first breathe matters. The language your ears first hear. The foods your nose first smells and your tongue first tastes. The soil you first crawl upon. My conscious brain might not remember, but something in me does.

It strikes me that I cannot claim this country’s serene coves and sun-soaked beaches without also claiming its poverty, its problems, its history. To say that any aspect of it is part of me is to say that all of it is part of me.

Fuck those people who say being born somewhere doesn’t count if you didn’t grow up there or because half your ancestors are from somewhere else. Fuck anyone who tries to tell you who you are and where you belong.

His life was defined by his constant drive to do what he thought was right. Mine is defined by everything I don’t do.

important that we remember everyone’s humanity. The world needs to know that all the people dying here are not nothing.

And if we do not live according to what we feel is right in our hearts, then what is the point of any of this?

“He was struggling. Just because he was a user, a pusher, it doesn’t mean that his life was worthless. It doesn’t mean that there wasn’t good in him.”

there’s something important in sharing this sorrow, in not carrying it alone.

Yet I smile and hug them each in turn and try to will my brain to remember every detail of this finite moment because, in this world, there are no guarantees.

“Even though you’re not Filipino—” “I am,” I interrupt. “But I’m also American.”

If we are to be more than what we have been, there’s so much that we need to say. Salvation through honesty, I guess.

But flawed doesn’t mean hopeless. It doesn’t mean forsaken. It doesn’t mean lost. We are not doomed to suffer things as they are, silent and alone. We do not have to leave questions and letters and lives unanswered. We have more power and potential than we know if we would only speak, if we would only listen.