A simultaneity of things.

​

HOW CAN THIS PLACE BE SO PEACEFUL for me yet so destructive to you?

This valley with its lush green grasses under my Converse sneakers. With its bright blue skies over my box-dyed hair. With its morning birds chirping to each other as I type with my thumbs on my phone. With its desert-yellow flowers I capture on my NatGeo app. And as I get closer to my brother's home in the mountains, I walk on cracked asphalt, passing a plastic, broken Pelon con Rico container on the floor, blown out of a trash can by the high winds. 

All of this new history I'd never before considered, things I was today-years-old when I found out from Wikipedia: a series of coordinated, targeted massacres, whittling your numbers down, down, down; what we call conquest you recognize as death. The words we use place us up high, like we're sitting on top of some sort of podium at the tops of these mountains, as if Lincoln giving us free land meant that we deserved it. 

We think of ourselves as liberal. As permissive. Compared to the other states, California has the most hippie-loving, free-spirit, flip-flop-wearing people, right? We smoke our marijuana, we pay our new parents to bond with their children. But none of this belongs to us. I know this, in an out-of-body kind of way, in a sense that's more like a niggling feeling at the back of my mind, but I don't know it in my body, in the sense that you do. My body--my parents' bodies--does not exist here in spite of attempts to slaughter it. My body is welcomed. My skin is welcomed. Not because of who I am but because of what I look like, because I look like the colonizers who killed you.

When I look at myself in the mirror I don't think of myself as the descendant of a colonizer. I look at the bits of eyebrows that have grown back despite my best efforts to pluck them out over decades. I look at the acne that climbs its way further down my face, day after day, forming painful cysts under my jaw. I look for imperfections, but I don't see the ones inherent to my own history. 

Partially because that's not how I read it. Partially because that's not how it was written. ​

I suppose colonizers never think of themselves as the villains. Those stories are always written as victories, the genocides and rapes involved in them considered necessary evils. I don't believe, anyway, in good and evil, in heroes and villains; those stories are too easy, and life is too messy for those stories to be reality. Heroes deserve rewards, while villains deserve punishment. 

But at the core of it all, none of us deserves anything. At the core of it all, we all just want the same thing, don't we? To survive, to be loved? And for people to leave us the fuck alone.

These seem like easy things to provide for each other, and I can't help but wonder why it's so difficult in practice. ​