we all know the diver, when suspended at tipping point, spreads his chest like a peregrine and holds the air still. that moment, when the lungs of the swimmer's chest open, before he condenses into a kingfisher’s beak and plops into the water, up there looking down, that moment of weightlessness; that’s when the swimmer accepts his fate to descend into the narrow of hell from the horizontal heaven. those are the split seconds of death when he is in a law of his own. an adventure in constriction. the crimson spring descending.

 

i trusted the notes of others in school over my own. even when i took them well. the structure of school never suited someone like me, who only wanted to do what he did and never wondered why, or where this all led to. i knew that algebra and whatever that computer class was wasn’t something i would, not pursue, because my parents never sent me to bed capitalist, but something that would stick, and algebra wasn’t it. that wouldn’t get me out of my head, out of my ways, and neither would that other class that lasted a whole three hours, i mean how does anyone even get through all of this? when i took good notes, i didn’t believe them. the suspicion of system slowly sneaking its way into my gross motor of being. 

 

the world is undesigned. for me; my neighbours and my classmates were the registered citizens. i was the, you know when you wave your hands around, and you search for a word, before you find that word, that was me. the one who couldn’t help your child with grades, but who was more loyal to your child than her system. not a bad word uttered about me, only bad letters in report cards, and assessments matter i was told. fitting inside pants only to grow out of them in six months, wearing shoes too big on purpose. growth was sudden, continuous. slowly having to accept the lack of control over my own nature, and circumstance. 

 

these boys who were all bald and wore adidas everything found this kid. it was winter, european, that sharp wind was in, the one that is not reflected in the trees until spring comes around and you realise fruit was nowhere to be seen, then you think back to this wind, the culprit of miscarriage. and so the knives were among us. these balded kids came through two big concrete buildings, found this other kid (the only living thing around, he must have had an errand to run), and they stripped him bare and threw him in the puddle. the puddle wasn’t on the basketball court, but i knew it well, the ball would bounce over and ah, what’re you gonna do. this kid in his white underwear, like my father’s, rolled around with heavy kicks to his thighs and ass. in the cold his flesh looked like a bloodied sky, throbbing for cover. you know when pain freezes over inside the body, delaying reaction for privacy, that. he seemed quiet, pregnant, staying submerged, waiting for the hell to calm down. when the boys left he found his clothes and went dripping, i assume home, in one of those apartments that pillared the winter and the pond of his beating. from the window, inside our kitchen, i watched on. all the boys were the same age. only one of them ran errands for his mother, i presumed, from the bonfire of safety. 

 

for national day (i think that’s what it was called, i don’t know where the inter escaped to) my flag was nowhere to be found. there were jars around the school with little tooth-picked flags; you could walk by and claim one. mine was missing. i knew it would be. you know someone will forget something they need but you don’t mention it because you hope, you hope they aren’t a pattern in and of themselves and therefore proving that you too are not a pattern in and of yourself, and so then they forget. i got a dutch flag and flipped that bitch upside down. where are you from? as i walked around with the thing. look it up man, the colours are straightforward. 

 

a kid from my class hated me for no reason other than that his parents told him he should. this was not a proud moment from our past. we mostly shared a history innocent of our making and so the opening dialogue between us was charged by the living ghosts of trauma. this kid had a smile in the sides of his eyes and a baseball cap of a team that liked red, i still remember his name even tho we were never cool like that. he didn't speak our mother tongue. that makes all the difference. it alienates our familiarity enough to quietly love one another from a distance.

 

my explorer of choice was christopher columbus. i never heard of him, apparently he was italian but sailed from spain towards what he thought was india. he sailed before then too, but this one must have been important because i was forced to learn about it. i actually had to do a whole project on this journey. my family helped me the day before with this thing, i got a good grade, and everyone could tell i was not responsible for this grade. for this sailor. were their spices really that good? i wondered if other italians sailed for spices. i thought him heroic for taking a dangerous journey for curries and things. by all accounts he made it back home in one piece. i would never have trusted my map. but the americans were happy with me, my family’s democratic effort, and it showed in the grades.

 

that same year, a boy who looked in some way like me, tho he spoke with his chin (you know boys who mistake their chin for their father’s), wanted to fight me. what i lacked in academia and machismo i made up for in tongue. chin boy and i never had any real beef, by this stage i understood the colours of force and so i cast his free to see if they disappeared in the waters of patience and change. they never did. and so we were never friends. tho he thought we were cool. no one wanted to fight me after, not out of fear or anything, but because it was just not worth it. disengagement is the mother of all humiliation, peace turns the mirror sharply and the face of self annihilation can be a bitch.

 

and so, they started bombing us, over there. one kid said, we will bomb your whole family. said it a few times, it turned into a daily blitzed game of tag. his were bombing mine so this was somehow appropriate. he was a short kid, faster, and would outrun me. the point guard to my small forward. we wore targets on our chests; utilitarian, unromantic, in laminated little tags, every day. my sister's friend, this korean kid, attached a target on his guitar when he played at a school concert; his show of support for people who stood on bridges over there where we came from. arms linked together, looking up and waiting for the drop, the light from the sky to make its choice. and none of our mothers, the ones seeing the backs of their children, said be careful as they left the underground shelters, the sirens furnishing abandoned space. there is no care in oblivion. 

 

this big, i mean big big boy, known for his slowness, shyness and awkward knees, was in my class. and one time i was stuck on a volleyball team with him and all girls. the other teams were stronger, more masculine and capable, one group even gave themselves a name (this was a little tournament for one class, teams were purely an exercise in convenient division, not destiny). and so, against the world, we won it all that day. it was incredible. a ball sailed so fast one time christina yelled, that knocked the diabetes right outta my momma’s foot. in truth, we actually didn't win. we were in the finals, tho we should have been eliminated way earlier. i always forget, i forget we don’t win in the end. it really feels like we do. i was the best on the team but our points came from all over, everybody getting in on the freedom. we knew life would be different on the outside, that our rectangle shouldered the brightness of possibility and the undying mentality of new hope. for that one class and one class only, we soared. and everyone knew it as they waited for our inevitable downfall. which came in the finals, a victorious loss to the powers. in the subsequent days we couldn’t track my family’s whereabouts, my mother would call leads she found online to get anything. her brothers and their families were running away from the only life they’d ever known. the situational estrangement dumbed me into a benign subject yet again. 

 

i was told i carried a heavy energy those days; when you could not see my smiling eyes either joking or distracting, i was heavy you are heavy. it's as if the distraction rendered a situation simple, and gifted itself to the passage of time's uncertainty to an everyday satisfaction. i argued with my history teacher that people in africa, in their mud huts, don’t need mobile phones, after she made a point of how we clutched to ours. of course they didn't; they don't have cars or malls or internet. i argued. it doesn't mean anything they don't, it just means they have their own set of circumstances that have nothing to do with ours. why would we meddle? she likely used that take to engage discussion as opposed to argue a stance. i was right of course, tho I should not have picked the fight. no one liked her; i fell in line and unliked her too. all my history teachers that followed were wonderful. her guilt lied in the attempt to stimulate the minds of young jokers who mistook distraction for life, her sacrifice was herself; hundreds of kids spending the coming lifetime remembering her name with disdain, detached from knowledge, subjecting her to pure tribal reaction. a teenage nation and the cruelty of confusion. 

 

my family never ran away from the war, we held the cards of predestiny; a resourceful father, a relentless mother. they both came from different parts, both parts complicated by a history of men. one had a background of oceanic trade, the other of land-locked protection. finally returning, they were guilty of being neither; nor run aways, nor survivors. after the first war, my father, who should have been killed there, refused to give up his land. and as his children, we were made aware that these ruins now belonged to ghosts, not offspring. our house still stands, an erected rejection. to some it was fundamental to the architecture of space, to others it was a violence unfulfilled. and after the second war, the one we wore targets for, my mother was unable to return to her home; it had become mere land now, obliterated with new seeds. she has no idea where her father is buried, she sees him in white butterflies now that feel too young.  

 

i have never endured brightness in the night sky descending, nor the heavy camouflage approaching my door. i have not fallen off a tractor during an escape, breaking my leg. i did not migrate to australia with my family, nor did i ever see my father in a turtle suit. i was never taught to hate, even when others, ones who looked like me, and ones who look like you, did. and later, when the kingfishers, the cormorants, the darters, and the bald eagles swooped down onto the hospitals, churches, and the civilian bridges covered in chains of people, i did not bear the artillery then either, i was no sea to the onslaught. i was a quiet passenger, watching some bald boys toss a mother’s errand around a pond in the dead of winter, then retreat to their castle, leaving a wet heap. 

 

he was found slumped after a bird landed on his building, forcing the floors above him to sit down. the east and west differ on the precise number of people killed in those 78 days of shelling, both accusing the other of convenient renaissance. i wonder if my grandfather is still waiting to be counted. a diver suspended inside an endless blue circle, looking down wide-lunged, waiting for a reflection.