Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

Talia considered how people who do horrible things can be victims, and how victims can be people who do horrible things.

She told them her mother was abroad and sent her back to Colombia when she was a baby. But this particular family condition was so common it couldn’t possibly be considered trauma.

People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They’re wrong. It’s love.

He resented the idea of becoming what some called illegal, as if just waking up another day in North America made a person a felon.

Only women knew the strength it took to love men through their evolution to who they thought they were supposed to be.

What was it about this country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.

Their separation was involuntary. But time and borders did more to distance them than any divorce or widowing could.

Another word I hate: minority. A way to imply we’re outnumbered (we’re not), and suggest we are less than.

Leaving is a kind of death. You may find yourself with much less than you had before.

That night I thought about how love comes paired with failures, apologies for deficiencies. The only remedy is compassion.

And maybe there is no nation or citizenry; they’re just territories mapped in place of family, in place of love, the infinite country.