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.

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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.