We Are Not From Here

by Jenny Torres Sanchez

I want to close my eyes, sleep, but when I do, the faces of others on this train with me flash through my mind; I see their lives and what they’re running from. I see fruitless farms and families with nothing to eat. I see people held at knifepoint. I see money exchanging hands. I see blood and smell fear. I hear threats and feel intense desperation. So I keep my eyes open, focused on the door of the boxcar.

When you watch the dark for hours, it’s not hard to focus on the noises you hear. Mostly you hear your own voice. Telling you all kinds of things. Like maybe you were meant to die. That maybe your fate is your fate and there is no way to escape your fate. That maybe your body is too tired, too weak. You hear the voice of giving in. Of giving up. But there’s another voice, too, that comes from the pit of your stomach. And it’s the voice that says, You deserve to live. Look what you will do, what you will put yourself through, just for a chance. You hold on to that voice, and you make it louder and louder, until it fills up your head. You listen to it as long as you can because you know how it goes silent as you ride, you know how it gets drowned by other voices and the sound of the train. And then you have to find it all over again.

And I know, even at that age, that he’s already thinking about leaving, too. That he’s already imagining himself on that train. And I wonder if he’ll ever be on it. In search of someone who left long ago.

Feeling too much will kill me, I tell my heart. Not feeling anything will, too, it says.

We are specks that don’t matter to this world. 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.

As a mother, and a daughter of immigrants, I could not stop thinking of the children on that train. Of how luck, circumstance, the dirt on which I gave birth were the only difference between them and my children.