A wave of saudade swept over me as I realized home never existed at all. The concept of home felt far from my reach, and I felt sick with longing.
Adversity has the remarkable ability of introducing the real you to yourself.
I left a piece of my soul that will always rightfully belong in the desert.
Everyone around me was allowed, permitted to fall apart; yet I had to think twice. I couldn’t bear to take another dip into an ocean of solitude for another taste of ostracization. I felt I would die.
It was a frightening metaphor for what the United States was becoming – a Titanic of rich, proud dimwits heading for the iceberg of anti-colonialist backlash.
To stay alive, you have to keep moving. Running, relocating, driving, doing everything in your power to stay in motion and make it to safety.
A moving target is harder to kill, and I didn’t stop running, maneuvering, until I reached home base, where I could breathe between death-defying sprints. I just need to make it home alive, and this will all be over, I told myself. Home.
It is not enough to hope for something to happen and throw it into the universe. You, too, must also work to make it happen.
The open road. Seemingly my only friend for years upon end since leaving war. The road embraced me, let me breathe, and more importantly, did not judge me.
Travel can sometimes push us to lose ourselves and find ourselves at once. The shedding of old prejudices, dead skin, and the opening of one’s eyes is far better than what any mainstream news outlet could ever tell you.
How often do the poor in the US get to stand in front of their nation’s Marie Antoinette’s and shove the stale, mass-produced cake of lower class reality back into their mouths?
Get acquainted with your shadow, or find yourself surprised when a crisis emerges.
I have been cheated out of being treated like a human being. In my reflection I saw an empty vessel. They had cheated me and I was desperate to make the sharp pain in my head stop.
Ramadi’s sky was generously filled with stars. Celestial ornaments set against a banner of a deep blue velvet sky. It was a place where hell, death, and heaven were so clear and the closest I’ve felt to all three in my life.
If anyone thinks interracial “anything” is a big deal, they’re probably inbred.
I wasn’t a person after all. I was simply this exotic thing for people to observe and investigate, an alien in any environment I was in.
That’s what imperialism is all about, shoving your language, religion, culture, and race down others’ throats and telling them that they’re beneath you – and it’s not unique to the West either.
Someone can tell you all your life that you’re inferior, but it doesn’t matter until you accept it and allow for validation. Once validation takes place, it’s then that the colonial malaise sets in like smallpox.