All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

I did not know how to explain this stubborn love for my parents that I staggered under, iridescent and gigantic and veined with a terrible grief, grief for the ways their lives had been compost for my own.

Surrounded by white people as I had been ever since arriving in Aurora, I had chosen a kind of colorblindness, particularly to myself, had over time absorbed a white person’s way of looking at the world. A saturated sponge, waiting for the squeeze. I bumped into the division head standing in line beside me, sending glossy chicken and mushy florets onto his dress shoes.

I knew a certain kind of bombed-out, floodlit peace, the great terror and relief of being known.

My parents are good people. They love me so much. Everything they’ve done is for me. But they were always busy, always working. In our culture there is not always a big focus on, like, attention, affection, saying feelings out loud.

To him the future seemed endlessly uncertain. To procreate or not. To stay committed to this woman or not, and for how long. To invest in the stock market despite its evils. To vote Democrat or Green or not at all. Sometimes he’d read articles about permafrost melt and the diseases and methane that would be released into the atmosphere and wonder: Will I get to see the world end, how do I want to live when it does?

What nobody told me when I was a very young person was that obedience, fearful toeing of every line, chasing every kind of safety, would not save you. What nobody told me growing up was that sometimes your friends do join your family, fusing care, irritation, loyalty, shared history, and affectionate contempt into a tempered love, bright and daily as steel.