The Island of Forgetting

by Jasmine Sealy

And then you don’t often think about them anymore—all of those paths not taken, those lives unlived—but you carry them with you always.

Sometimes you just need to be anywhere other than where you are. Sometimes you need to walk away to remind yourself that you can.

I’m not sure which is worse: being a spectacle or being invisible.

been up to?” my mother would ask when she inevitably found me. But I wasn’t up to anything. The joy was just in being alone, in having no one to answer to, in being under no one’s scrutiny.

Most white men, I’ve found, have never met a silence they can’t fill.

What could I possibly mean to a man who spends his life travelling from place to place, forever altering their landscapes in his wake?

there is no freedom in the familiar. Only comfort, and slow death.