Oct 16, 2019
Where Once Were Qilin: Return to Nanjing
What did it mean that now both the villages and the qilin were gone? This portal to the ancestors gone forever.
What did it mean that now both the villages and the qilin were gone? This portal to the ancestors gone forever.
On a remote island north of the Arctic Circle, several centuries’ worth of human-made pollutants have come to rest.
The contours of a border become a lot less rigid when you carry what are deemed to be the right documents.
We think of explorers in terms of what they discovered—the Eureka moment, not the search. The search is imperfect and frustrating and owes you nothing.
Like much of Florida, it appears both ridiculous and dangerous and gambling is involved. I think. I still don’t understand it.
I’m longing for the day when folk like me and Trayvon and Korryn and Lennon and Aiyana and Botham don’t need to be lucky to stay alive.
The more I wrote about women, the more distanced I felt from the figure I saw in the mirror.
My idea of home had changed, so I took the symbolic step of finding a new tailor—marking Philadelphia as a place that now fit me right, too.
There was nowhere to go back to. Oklahoma was out of the question, always out of the question. But then, where was home?
Home means that you’re anchored in something deeper than second-hand nostalgia, that you miss your country because it is a part of you.
Fortunately, the recession did not affect the prices of alcohol in the way that the price of shaving cream and school fees had nearly tripled.
It’s not my job to absorb every feeling a man has. In my classroom, I am the one who decides whose feelings get airtime, and how they are shared.
France is famous for its commitment to authority and order, but every so often the top blows off the mountain and you’re left with a volcanic cauldron of revolution.
People will tell you the Marlins suck, that no one likes the Marlins. “Marlins fans?” they’ll joke, because everyone knows that Marlins fans don’t exist. Except they do, we do.
Writing was just something I thought happened to people naturally, that whatever wasn’t written was eventually forgotten. And I wanted to remember everything.
I chose to treat myself with ease—to not resist my natural response, but to sit with it, allow it to manifest, and reflect on why so many of us felt this way and what it could teach me.
If you’re lonely, you can spot another lonely person a mile off. The lonely can recognize kin.
Others began to intrude in what had once been a mom-and-pop operation. The conversion from hobby to profession had been made.
I am a Kenyan, an African, someone from the ‘global south.’ It is my job to prove I deserve to travel. It doesn’t matter how talented or smart or wealthy I or others like me are; we need a good passport.
