Mar 30, 2020
All That I Can’t Carry
The life of my Lolo and my family in the Philippines is a deep reminder that people live full lives there and places like it, across the globe.
The life of my Lolo and my family in the Philippines is a deep reminder that people live full lives there and places like it, across the globe.
Will the vertigo again become acute? Will the stress of this, or some root cause that spurs it, end my life before it might otherwise end?
The forces of air travel are virtually unknowable and immense, and we ourselves are small. I find a sort of peace in that.
As the plane began to taxi, the first line of the comic Riri Williams: Ironheart #1 danced in my mind: “I was never meant to fly.”
It’s Nigeria, after all. Hope is what keeps many alive. In plethora of sufferings and fears, prayers abound.
My parents wanted to give me opportunities that they never had, to let me participate in bizarre American rites of passage.
We pass other boats and, from each one, there is the double-take, a stare. Two boats full of only black people is apparently a rare sight.
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.
