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I am no longer convinced America is an aftertaste worth swallowing my pride for. Not recognizing the pennies under our feet when we walk like Lincoln was just a stepping stone towards freedom. How ironic we put his face on the only coin with colored skin. The American Dream is my breath stretching over oceans, trying so hard not to forget my homeland. It is being born wrapped into a star-spangled banner with a red hole in it. But I’ve learned the price of having an ocean on your tongue because even when you have all of your papers, the rock and the hard place of a country that wants to cut you out will always win when it shoots. The American Dream is struggling. The American struggle is dreaming. The struggling American Dreams understand when security is a lot more political than it is social- who you are will always clash with whom a society beckons of you. The American Dream is being in a school with more barricades than books, building a wall where we are all brick layers with the same idea. Wishing for white picket flesh while living with sectioned bones on the wasteland of the free, home of the brave, hand over your heart like a small fixed blanket; the American Dream is institutional. It is immigrant experience or experience immigration. People are more concerned about students being documented than they are about being human.
As we turn around the corner, there is a gaggle of women. The driver of the car that I am in looks out the window and spits, How much? . Eyes as wide as dinner plates, they’d scurry around the corner like shot pool balls, as I have done so many times. The whole van hoots, fist bumps, and hollers; there are not enough seats for both a woman and the joke to fit comfortably in the car. When I get the courage to say something, I’m two weeks late and encouraged by Bacardi and the party.
That as women, our worth is discretely wrapped around lace and cotton; our fragility armored in pepper spray and mace. They say one in ten, one in six, and one in three women will be raped or sexually abused in their lifetime, and I am one of three daughters. Now imagine each victim is an acrobat. Her sanity; a balancing act. Our response is the unfailing safety net. We never expect to see her across the wire. You weren’t just violated , we tell her. You are an empty museum. A gutted monument to what used to hold so much worth . And with the best intentions, we tell her to reclaim it. Put a price tag on rape and own it, but don’t stand too tall, don’t act too strong. We will name your denial. Come back when you’re ready to crumble like your bones are made of chalk. You may only laugh cutely or cry beautifully, so cry beautifully, we will catch you. We are calling it theft. As if he could pluck open your ribs like cello strings, steal what makes your heart flutter, and tack its wings to his wall. And I know it’s hard to feel perfect when you can’t tell Adam’s apple from a fist because some ashtray of a man picked you to play his Eden. This country is like my bones are the forgotten fossils of a skeleton sunken city, filled with mouths that are boneyards of teeth broken from biting down on themselves.
Hollow auditoriums of chests swoon with echoes of heartbeats asking, breathing for the blissful taste of freedom. F-R-E-E-D-O-M. Those letters never seem to escape from the parted lips with the kiss of mint breath. You see, those letters are the flowers shoved into the barrel of a pistol, hoping to stop the bullet from shooting. Whether it be social injustice or justice for society there will always be a bullet. That bullet will be as hollow as a pin-pricked egg, a drain clogged with too many opinions. You don’t have a gun safe. That gun will roam and tiptoe around your fingers, hoping one day it’ll slip under your tongue, down your throat, choking from the glass of your rivalries. America, the home of the free and the land of the brave.
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