I Am A Country of Wants
When all you want is to tell a new story.
1.
When I am nine, a teacher in my school plays Nazi camp films. I don’t remember if she showed them to the entire class or only to me, but I can still see a pyre of bodies, skin barely draped over skeleton, the black and white of a television screen. At the time I didn’t understand what I was witnessing — horror hovered in the room but I couldn’t feel out its shape.
I’m a child witnessing bodies that resemble the kind overdosed in parks and alongside dumpster bins in the backs of supermarkets. I compare that which I see to that which I know because in childhood there exists no context — the bodies in the film seem like the bodies on the street, only there are more of them. We children, we are lament, we are gold, so why are we surrounded by so much decay? Why does the rot rise up all around us?
My teacher clasps a silver bracelet festooned with seashells around my wrist — it felt good to be wanted. It felt good to be loved. I tell this story to one of my friends who has an infant daughter, and the way she arranges her face in response gives me pause. She can’t imagine her daughter being exposed to a body writhing and releasing under the elevated subway near the park. She can’t fathom having to explain the brutal and systematic annihilation of a people to a…
