All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Thinking of my parents, living two oceans away, with their slackening bodies, their private burdens.

It’s very expensive, poverty.

While two people are still alive to try, he said, it’s never too late, and it’s never the end.

Just as romantic love faded or fractured, so too could friendship end.

This cycle, you know, of pressures, then rebellion, then freedom, and then choosing the traditional path of one’s own choice, that is how we all understand, now, what it means to be young.

This is what it means, to come here as an immigrant. You are here on sufferance. You are a form of currency, not a person, and only a person has the right to desire, which is to say, to be difficult.

I lay in bed and looked on Facebook at other people’s lives, feeling a degree of disbelief that anyone in the world had energy enough to get engaged, start a dream job, move cross-country, travel.

I ruin everything I touch.

we are, at the close of things, bags of meat and blood encasing what’s ensouled: mercurial, flickering, holy.

Because good love can rescue a person. Pull them out of the waves. Bad love is a rip current. It can drown you.

Basically love exists to market expensive fitness classes to straight people.

Love of most kinds could not feed you, could not house you, could not protect you from permanent bone loss that would eventually cause your very teeth to fall out of your head.

I’m just so tired, they said, voice small and quavering, of how everybody, every evil boss, every landlord, every capitalist, every cop, gets away with it. I want someone to for once not get away with it.

at the end of the world, let there be you, my world. —Danez Smith