Patron Saints of Nothing

It’s weird to be this open with him, to not hold anything back. It’s like we’re characters in a cartoon who have continued to run over and past the edge of the cliff, defying the laws of physics. This is just not the kind of relationship we have, and I fear I’ll eventually say something wrong, and we’ll plummet. But I keep talking because I’m deter

I was so close to feeling like I had Jun’s story nailed down. But no. That’s not how stories work, is it? They are shifting things that re-form with each new telling, transform with each new teller. Less a solid, and more a liquid taking the shape of its container.

Surely the air your lungs first breathe matters. The language your ears first hear. The foods your nose first smells and your tongue first tastes. The soil you first crawl upon.

It was like he used all his compassion on strangers and ran out by the time he came home.

“Maybe you haven’t developed a passion yet because you’ve spent your entire life doing what others wanted you to do.”

It strikes me that I cannot claim this country’s serene coves and sun-soaked beaches without also claiming its poverty, its problems, its history. To say that any aspect of it is part of me is to say that all of it is part of me.

“You want me to come with you?” he asks, like he doesn’t understand why I’m upset. And that’s a big part of the problem. He doesn’t. He can’t.

We can only handle so much truth at any given moment,

It’s a sad thing when you map the borders of a friendship and find it’s a narrower country than expected.