Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

How many improbable moves did it take for us to reach each other? How many miles? How many decisions made by those before us, to carry themselves from one place to another, from the familiar to the new?

Their youth made it impressive—that they could saunter effortlessly ahead of the rest. I wondered how they afforded it, if their parents were rich, or if there was another way to access this life that I had yet to understand.

I have no coherent thoughts, just a rush of feeling, like oversaturated, garish bursts of color.

I thought about the many aspects in this life that I could not control or understand, despite how much I wanted to or tried, how my father’s life, my mother’s life, the lives around me and the figures from the past, they were not mine to determine, not mine to map out, no matter how much they shaped what I had become, however much we were connected, I could only help in small ways, I could listen and piece together and recount, but what was truly mine was only a little, no, a minuscule speck of it all, and while this was a sort of devastation to me, one I knew it would take some time to fully accept, it felt nice, at least, to be on the way, in spite of not knowing exactly how far I had come nor how far I had left to go.