Tag Archives: high school

Swelling

Geraldine Salinas stood perfectly still in the hallway. The bell was going to ring in a minute or two. Gerry held her notebook in one hand and the book she was reading for class, Peace and Boats, in the other. “What’s it about?” some overfamiliar stranger would ask her. “Peace,” Gerry would invariably reply. “And boats.”

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Language of Love

You get off the bus and it’s still sorta cold out but not quite cold enough to snow, so you’re drenched in freezing rain. Let me tell you something: there is nothing worse than freezing rain. It reaches to your core and freezes that and then your body takes the rest of your nerves along for the ride. It makes you feel barren. Not even a living human being. You are a husk of ice.

Your history teacher was talking about the Holocaust when Jews and Socialists and Homosexuals were killed and she said that trauma is indescribable with regular words. The only way to know is to feel it yourself. So you know you’re cold, but you can never really tell somebody what it’s like.

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