The Falling Bookcase
During this trip to California I am meeting up with people I haven't seen in years, in some cases, I haven't seen or heard from them in close to a decade. It is interesting to experience the memories that people have of you after a long stretch of time. Are you frozen in time to them? Have they imagined future for you even if it matches nothing that you have done since you last saw them? Today I met up with someone who heard me read poetry a long time ago in San Diego, when I was attending grad school at UCSD. We had only met a couple of times, but for him it was an important meeting because I was the first person from Guam, he had met, who talked about Guam in a critical way. He had heard me read a poem on Chamorros being a footnote to the American Empire. It is something that struck and stuck with him ever since. For me, I cling to moments like this, and I thread them together to create my personal necklace of relevance. It is so easy sometimes to feel like nothing I do