Migrations

It’s the wilderness within that demands I survive.

He’s opened the cage door I closed on myself and now I’ll fly, I’ll have to.

He isn’t John Torpey, frightened of having a wife who was wilder than he was, punishing her for it and living a life of regret.

She wanted me to go back to the sea, so at least one of us could live.”

If they’ve died, all of them, it’s because we made the world impossible for them.

“My father strangled a man to death,” I tell him softly. “My mother hung herself with a rope about her neck. Edith drowned on the fluid in her lungs. And my body suffocated our daughter.

We’ll keep farmed creatures. Those will survive because we must keep our bellies full of their flesh. And domesticated pets will be fine because they let us forget about the rest, the ones dying. Rats and cockroaches will survive, no doubt, but humans will still cringe when they see them and try to exterminate them as though they are worth nothing, even though they are fucking miracles.”

I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million.

My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless.

Daeshim’s parents left a small village in South Korea for the most bustling, liberal place they could think of: San Francisco.