Consider the following
Consider the following
When I was in seventh grade, my teacher put on our desks a pop quiz, and question one was hard, but question five was harder (was the colonization of America inevitable?) and I stared at that question because I couldn't stop thinking about my home in Kashmir and the two militants who stood in our street every day looking at the kids going to school like we were the ones with guns and a grenade in our left trouser pocket, like we were the ones who killed people for fun and ruined lives because of an order or a religion, and I'm staring at this question because "inevitable" meant their violence was fate and I don't see it written in the stars; fathers, brothers, lovers never returned home save for a rotting corpse but they never returned; no, they didn't, but the guns did and it was a choice, it was, the violence, the pain, it was a choice like the question in front of me and I can't choose because none of the answer choices were as I just explained and my head hurt and my eyes did too because I hadn't got much sleep the night before, studying for this stupid class and why oh why did I do that because now I was just going to fail this quiz anyway because of this one dumb question about inevitability and it was hard for me to think of anything as inevitable but I guess the extinction of humanity was inevitable, but then again there was a differing definition of humans between homo sapiens themselves where a genocide of brown people doesn't mean much (I mean, it happens all the time, right?) but mugging two white people headlines, so if homo sapiens went extinct I would probably overthink like I'm doing now, and leave this monster of a sentence to help no one in its neither brief nor visually appealing complexion and so I glanced around at the kids chewing on their respective pencils shrouded in the pale light of a tube bulb that hung by two partially rusted chains above the light blue tables and then I looked back at the four bubbles I couldn't fill and thought of my painfully annoying teacher and wrote everything I wanted to write down anyway because even though it might be circled in red pen and have three red question marks next to it by tomorrow morning I thought of things that were inevitable like the extinction of homo sapiens and me, and I figured my small push of rebellion didn't mean much but I still felt pretty good because that day in fourth period in the humid Texas air I stared down inevitability in four small bubbles and
it
blinked
first.
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Consider the following
When I was in seventh grade, my teacher put on our desks a pop quiz, and question one was hard, but question five was harder (was the colonization of America inevitable?) and I stared at that question...