We Are Not From Here

by Jenny Torres Sanchez

I don’t want to be broken. I don’t want to be in pieces. There’s too much of that around us already.

You can outrun danger, it tells me. But you can’t outrun the pain.

why do we have to die to finally, finally be safe?

Maybe even when there are no more tears for my body to shed, I will still be crying.

“You need to feel human again.” I don’t want to feel human again. I want to feel human again. I want to live. I want to die. I want Chico back. I want a million contradicting impossible things, I want to tell them. How are any of them possible?

But here is what happens when you utter dreams—

They haunt you. Even if you discard them, they refuse to let you go.

Because now I know—those dreams were never meant for us.

But in my heart lingers some kind of hope about who I will still become.

Our lives, our dreams, our families don’t matter to this world. Our hearts, our souls, our bodies don’t matter to this world. All it wants to do is crush us. It

It is impossible—to travel so many miles, on the border of dreams and reality, of life and death, and come across the kindness, and love, and humanity of two sisters. It’s impossible.

Like there is not enough soap to wash away all of this pain, this rot. I think of how things, once rotted, can never be fixed.