“My sister fell ill and her medical bills cost 30,000 rupees. My father wasn’t getting his salary on time, so we had no options. I took a loan from the brick kiln and agreed to work for them until it was paid off. Other members of my family did the same. We thought it would only take three months. But when I went to leave, they told me I owed them 90,000 rupees. I couldn’t believe it. They told me I couldn’t leave. It’s like quicksand. They only pay you 200 rupees per 1000 bricks, and it all goes to them, and the debt keeps growing. We are supposed to work from dawn to dusk for six days a week, but we never get the 7th day off. They tell me I owe them 900,000 rupees now. There is no hope for me. Every year they have a market. The brick kiln owners get together and they sell us to each other. Just ten days ago my entire family was sold for 2.2 million rupees.” - Humans Of New York - Lahore, Pakistan.
I just cannot believe. I was never aware of this happening around us. This is so saddening. Definitely this needs to end. I thought such slavery did not exist in this world anymore, sadly it is rooted in my own country. Millions of people on stake..
Lake Mendota, Wisconsin Have you said everything you were going to say about skin, Kevin? How about everything you were going to say about obscurity & loss? These are the things you know— There has been a key for every lock you’ve picked & when you picked the locks the keys lost all their weight. You know your name is tattooed in black letters on the asphalt of I-90 somewhere between Madison & Pittsburgh. You know wherever it is you are today is not where you were born & the girls to whom you give your number have no idea not a single ending in your life has been beautiful. When you see your father’s name on the Caller ID, a shot of whiskey spills suddenly inside you. For a time you were younger than your older brother, & the only reason you are older than him now is because you kept on living. You don’t know who the rowboat that is moored in the middle of the bay belongs to, but you know at night it dreams about the oars it lost to the mud at the bottom of the lake. You know there are things which are genetic & things which are learned & then, there are the things from which you will never be detached. This is what I’m trying to say: I miss my brother. I’ve missed him ever since that train wreck inside the tunnel of his vein, a tunnel which instead of openings had thick walls paved with light on either end. Once, he shoved me off a dinghy & when the propeller bloomed a wake over my head he called it my baptism. This is why my father conceived an imaginary son who writes better poems than I do. This is why I am so far from the place where I was born & why every morning when I shave I want to crawl into the angle of the mirror that most resembles childhood. I take it back: I have no idea what that rowboat dreams of. I don’t know the last wishes of those oars that sunk to the bottom of the lake, or even if there were any oars in the rowboat to begin with. I don’t know the size of the scar inside my father or how a chain link fence must have begun to rust around his heart. I don’t know what made my brother do it. But back to what I know: tonight there is a star in the sky for every period that has been forgotten by a suicide note. Because the phone would not stop ringing, I have locked myself out of my apartment & come to this pier to see how the waves cradle a dinghy to sleep. I don’t return my calls because I have learned the brief spittle of last kisses is always a kind of bleeding. I have grown into my brother’s Timberlands & when I walk on gravel I know he’s in the gaps between the pebbles. To die is to leave the keys inside the skin & lock yourself forever outside the body. Tonight this is what remains: a stationary keel, the unstirred petals of the propeller. Father, I don’t care if this is earned: I have just caught myself rehearsing your eulogy.
And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market — the quips, the witticisms, the slant adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears, their tears confused with their diamond earrings, their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat, their response and your performance twinned. The jokes over the phone. The memories packed in the rapid-access file. The whole act. Who will do it again? That’s it: no one; imitators and descendants aren’t the same.
Though my mother was already two years dead Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas, put hot water bottles her side of the bed and still went to renew her transport pass.
You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone. He’d put you off an hour to give him time to clear away her things and look alone as though his still raw love were such a crime.
He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief though sure that very soon he’d hear her key scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief. He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea.
I believe life ends with death, and that is all. You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same, in my new black leather phone book there’s your name and the disconnected number I still call.
What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm, brush your fingertips along the life line’s crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport, when the car in front of me doesn’t signal, when the clerk at the pharmacy won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt. They’d just had lunch and the waiter, a young gay man with plum black eyes, joked as he served the coffee, kissed her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left. Then they walked half a block and her aunt dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?
Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies. No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain but has her death in it. The silence of her dying sounds through the carousel of language. It’s a web on which laughter stitches itself. How can my hand clasp another’s when between them is that thick death, that intolerable distance?
She grieves for my grief. Dying, she tells me that bird dives from the sun, that fish leaps into it. No crocus is carved more gently than the way her dying shapes my mind. – But I hear, too, the other words, black words that make the sound of soundlessness, that name the nowhere she is continuously going into.
Ever since she died she can’t stop dying. She makes me her elegy. I am a walking masterpiece, a true fiction of the ugliness of death. I am her sad music.
After your mother dies, you will learn to live on the edge of life, to brace yourself like she did, one hand on the dashboard, the other gripping your purse while you drive through the stop sign, shoulders tense, eyes clamped shut, waiting for the collision that doesn’t come. You will learn to stay up all night knowing she’s gone, watching the morning open like an origami swan, the sky a widening path, a question you can’t answer. In prison, women make tattoos from cigarette ash and shampoo. It’s what they have. Imagine the fish, gray scales and black whiskers, growing slowly up her back, its lips kissing her neck. Imagine the letters of her daughter’s name a black chain around her wrist. What is the distance between this moment and the last? The last visit and the next? I want my mother back. I want to hunt her down like the perfect gift, the one you search for from store to store until your feet ache, delirious with her scent. This is the baggage of your life, a sign of your faith, this staying awake past exhaustion, this needle in your throat.
The worst part about losing a pet (whether they’ve died, run away or been given away) is when you temporarily forget that they’re gone, like you know they’re gone but there’s that split second where you see something and ur like “aw (pets name) would love this! I should get-” and then it hits you that they aren’t around anymore and it doesn’t matter how long it’s been all it takes is one thing to bring everything rushing back and you feel your heart break all over again because you can’t buy them that treat or that toy or take them to that cool pet friendly event anymore and it hits you so hard and it hurts so much. That’s the worst part, those moments where you think of how much they would love something before remembering that they aren’t around to love it anymore.
It was always okay Steve you go make your dreams come true. Go study and do what you love! You did a decent goodbye! An you left us with a just as awesome host, Joe! You made sure everything would go fine!
