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January 15 - January 15, 2022
They needed trash people. Poor black and brown people. People somehow on the “wrong side” of the wall, even though they were the ones who built it. People brought for labor, or come for refuge, or who were here before the first neoliberal surveyed this land and thought to build a paradise. People who’d already thought this was paradise. They needed my people. They needed me. Of the 380 Earths with which we can resonate, I’m dead in 372. No, 373 now. I’m not a scientist. I’m just what they’re stuck with. The higher-ups call us “traversers” on paper. Using ports put in place by the last
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Because that’s what a sister is: a piece of yourself you can finally love, because it’s in someone else.
That day he was wearing the same outfit he wears every year in the annual press releases. The white shirt and wide-legged black pants that news outlets mock, and yet he refuses to change. If he were from Ash, I’d say he wears them because the mockery is a challenge and he can’t be seen backing down. But he’s not. He’s just one of those scatterbrained geniuses who doesn’t think about appearances.
If I figured anything out in these last six years, it is this: human beings are unknowable. You can never know a single person fully, not even yourself. Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make it in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if your cleverness would outlive your desperation.
We can’t ever really talk. I want to take her hands and tell her that, yes, she is better than me but that is because she is better than me. Not because Wileyites are better than Ashtowners, but because she is driven without being manipulative, she is ambitious but only until it edges over into cruelty. Until we have that common understanding, we can never really speak, and that’s something I’m just coming to terms with.
I don’t realize how many years I’ve been alone until I warm under a gift as simple as someone’s undivided attention.
“You’re going into Ashtown wearing all black?” asks Esther, whose long dress is in the customary gray of Ashtown funerals, though today’s apron is brown. Dell narrows her eyes. “All right. I give up. What does it mean if I wear all black?” I shrug. “It means you’re a professional, and you’re not dressed like a runner.” Dell looks down at her dress. “I’m dressed like a prostitute?” Prostitute is another word I learned only after I came to the city. Worker, provider, comforter, house cat, on and on—we have as many words for them as islanders have for water and northerners have for snow, but
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“The phenomenon of death is just the separation of the astral body from the physical body. It is the five elements of the body returning to their source. In the divine plan, every union must end with separation. Whether it was now, twenty years ago, or twenty years in the future, you were always going to lose her. We are pilgrims at an inn. When we leave is immaterial, because we are only meant to leave.”
I don’t bother going to Jean’s house, because I know he’ll be at his wife’s restaurant. She advertises it as authentic Ivorian cuisine, but Jean has confided in me that she doesn’t make it right for the public. I believe him, because the leftovers he brings me from their house have twice the smell and spice as what she serves for pay.
Exlee reminds me to say Jean’s name each morning and each night until the burial, because our dead are only weights on our backs when we won’t let them walk beside us, when we try to pretend they are not ours or they are not dead.
They say hunting monsters will turn you into one. That isn’t what’s happening now. Sometimes to kill a dragon, you have to remember that you breathe fire too. This isn’t a becoming; it’s a revealing. I’ve been a monster all along.
