Memories (I)
Sandy gravel crunches under my feet.
My throat is scratchy, my joints swollen from the dry. The change in climate makes me feel like an intruder, and I want to do something to feel connected to this place.
I kneel and grasp a handful of the desert. It’s warm and hard against my skin. It falls through my fingers.
I stand back to full height, and squint at the rock and sagebrush that stretch to the mountains in the distance.
Who am I to talk about the concentration camps?
My family was incarcerated in Poston, Arizona during World War II, but I’m acutely aware that this isn’t my story, that I don’t have the right words for it.
I only have memories that aren’t mine.
Some of the ruins still stand.
A broken down elementary school sits behind a chain link fence. A skeletal barracks is there behind the local Baptist church.
But it's mostly been torn down.
My grandparents arrived in November, almost a year after the war started. They only had what they could carry--they lost the house, the farm, most of their possessions.
It was so cold that first desert night, they couldn't sleep.
When I come to Poston, and I see the openness, the miles of nothing, the massive blue sky, I get a feeling.
I wonder what they felt, if it was the same thing I feel now.
