All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

We all have our truth of a place. There is no universal narrative of any city that is also real. Only marketing.

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.

Perhaps this was the way of the world. Your best friend serving as placeholder for the real thing: the person who would audition to be your husband or wife.

A young woman is a decent daughter, chaste and godly, educated but not too much, successful but not too much, on her path to marry a decent paid-for man. Seen another way: a girl migrates to a new place but is too scared to grow up, still a Mummy and Papa’s girl, traditional to a fault, clinging to the old ways, choosing obedience over happiness out of childish fear. A young woman, corrupted by the new place, turns into a pervert, wrong in the head, crawling from bed to bed, kissing another woman’s neck like a deviant. Seen another way: a girl comes to the new country and finds freedom, finds herself, finally lives in the truth of her desire and ambition, lives like her life is her very own, lives like an American. These were the frames I could choose between, the choices I had. Green or blue. Blue or green. A or B. Sometimes green and blue collapse. Indistinct. Smudge into sameness. We know this. You could look at each of them and think, These are the same, only different based on who is looking. The way I had trained myself to think, I hovered between each of these quadrants, unstable. Had built careful firewalls partitioning the two halves of my life: the one that belonged to my parents and the place that I came from, the one that belonged only to me, shaped by this brash selfish country.