Distances

Distances


I've been thinking about pain, how each of us constructs our past
to justify what we feel now. How each successive pain distorts the
preceding.

*

I picked up the phone because it was ringing.
"Do you know who you are talking to?" the voice on the other end
asked.
"No," I said.
"Then you must have the wrong number," the voice said and hung
up.
*

Have you ever decided to love someone because they loved you first?

*

I've watched the Children of the Third World starving on television.
I've heard the stand up comic ask, "Why didn't the camaraman give
that kid a fucking sandwich?" I know all the mothers of America
have told their kids: "Clean up your plates. There are people starving
in India." When I was young, living on the reservation, eating
potatoes every day of my life, my mother would tell me to "clean
up your plate or your sister will get it."

*

A woman writes to a man who used to live here. I write back,
pretending I'm the man she's been searching for her whole life.
"Do you still love me?" she writes to ask him, and me.

*

I do not speak my native tongue. Except that is, for the dirty words.
I can tell you what I think of you in two languages.

*

EDWALL, WASHINGTON -- 186,000 miles

*

There is nothing as white as the white girl an Indian boy loves.

*

A photograph: Trina Andrews, reservation girl, nine years old, in
a wheelchair, legs useless because of cancer, wearing a wig, because
of the baldness induced by chemoltherapy, holding a bag of
Christmas goodies, Santa Claus hovering over her; a dozen kids
surrounding her, all staring into the lens, back at me and you.
In that bag: an orange, a handful of peanuts, a few hard candies,
and miles and miles of air.

*

My friend, Steve, told me this once: "All the girls I've ever loved
should have had their faces on the back of milk cartons."

*

Remember this: "Electricity is lightning, pretending to be permanent."

*

I was in a bar, drinking a beer, because it was filling the glass, when
a stranger walked in.


Sherman Alexie.............from The Business of Fancydancing