You have to dream big to get big.
The abused can become abusers. It’s a tragic progression.
I wasn’t afraid of the dark nearly as much as I was afraid of the monsters who hunted by night and day.
Death is always incongruous.
Of course, she didn’t care about me. She mostly made fun of me. But that just made me love her even more. She was out of my league, and even though I was only twelve, I knew that I’d be one of those guys who always fell in love with the unreachable, ungettable, and uninterested.
There is a good day to die and there is a good day to play the piano.
Junior talks about it – relating to dozens if not hundreds of tribes. Even as the world tries to define you, narrow the definition of you, don’t do it to yourself. True.
Grief is scary and beautiful, too, I thought, but did not text.
But I don’t know how much joy she experienced while loving me. I don’t know how much joy I was capable of feeling or providing.
One morning she sewed while her son and husband watched television. It was so quiet that when her son released a tremendous fart, a mouse, startled from his hiding place beneath my aunt’s sewing chair, ran straight up her pant leg.
Mostly, I just think Mr. P is a lonely old man who used to be a lonely young man. And for some reason I don’t understand, lonely white people love to hang around lonelier Indians.
I cry because I’m crying.
Son, things have never been like how you think they used to be.
I’m not an Indian warrior chief. I’m not some demure little Indian woman healer talking spider this, spider that, am I? I’m not babbling about the four directions. Or the two-legged, four-legged, and winged. I’m talking like a twentieth-century Indian woman. Hell, a twenty-first century Indian, and you can’t handle it, you wimp.
So maybe they are mute with post-traumatic stress. Maybe they don’t know how to talk about Mike. I often wonder why I’m the one who remembers All the pain. Why am I the one who remains obsessed By the bloody nose, but rarely remembers any joy?
We didn’t talk. Didn’t need to talk.
I cannot defeat cancer. Nobody defeats cancer. There is no winning or losing. There is no surviving or not surviving. There are only coin flips: heads or tails; benign or malignant; weight loss or bloating; morphine or oxycodone; extreme rescue efforts or Do Not Resuscitate; live or die.
We spend our lives with the person who has the same scars in the same places.
My white friends were visibly distressed by that loud singer and drummer. One of my friends, whom I shall call Tara, leaned forward and whispered, “I hate Indians.” My four other white friends gasped, but it took Tara a few moments to remember that she was sitting beside me, her Indian friend. She burst into tears and spent the rest of the night apologizing. “It’s okay,” I kept saying. But it wasn’t. I was hurt, ashamed, and angry.
But, like water falling drop by drop onto your face for hours and days and weeks, that tiny insults slowly came to have enormous power over me.