The Tusks of Extinction

We are continually shaped by our past, and we continually reshape it.

It was the way of life. The density of the population. And its lack of connection to nature. To anything outside of the endless canyons and towers of man.

in Hong Kong everything was compressed, anonymous, tangled. Everything was the crowd, the mass. And I was always on the outside.

all of it began in killing that took place far away. That took place somewhere the people who thought of ivory as a material could not see. Killing that took place in an extraction zone.

no one comes from nowhere. We come from our own pasts. We rise up out of our memories, and once there are enough of those memories to stand upon, we move forward with their support beneath us, drawn toward the future they allow us to conceive.

The hint of hair products, soaps familiar to her, that pulled at strands of memory.

Hong Kong, too, was connected to nature. Yes—I saw that. But what I saw, I did not love. It was connected to nature, but only to draw it into itself. To consume it. Hong Kong was a vortex: