“Please keep writing. I like your penmanship and your poetry. Your words are beautiful.” She said.
She lived on the other side of the world. A place I had only heard of from people who had heard from someone who had heard…
Out here, we want to feel strongly about things that we borrowed.
Religions.
We like what they give us. But – we don’t live in their houses…
We’ve never seen their shadows or their demons. We seperated ourselves from them with a body of water. And declared them our own.
She was a writer
She wrote about her questions and how she watched classmates disappear. Never knowing if they were alive. Growing up surrounded by fighting and being told they had to choose. Between fighting or an education.
She wrote about love
And growing
I felt so entirely separated from these things…
Time has a way of slowing us down
Graying hair
And speeding up…
Someone said the world would be better without a Jew
And someone else was crying because they read an article saying Maya Angelou died today…
I didn’t have the heart to tell them, she passed away in Twenty Fourteen…
I was standing outside a grocery store. When a girl wearing a Dupatta walked out. And a man turned and said “what the?? I don’t want to get blown up.”
A few days later , I was talking to an older man when he saw a couple walk by. A white girl and a black man. He erupted. “That’s unnatural. The animal kingdom doesn’t even mix species. It’s a sin. And disgusting.”
Time passes
But
It was just yesterday
Wasn’t it…
We borrow things.
We make them our own.
Without understanding the depth of what we’ve taken.
“Keep Writing please. I love your words.”
She was muslim.
sometimes I look for her and wonder where she went
How she is
If she, herself, continued writing…
If she kept her faith
And if I even kept mine…
