I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every state I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.
If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn’t afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they’re seventeen.
There are young women who have goals other than finding a husband.
The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.
There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.
(¼) “When I was twelve years old, they undressed a Tutsi girl in front of my entire school. They wanted to see if her private parts were the same as other people. She kept trying to cover herself with her hands while they pulled out her hairs one by one. I can still hear the laughter. Even with all the violence that came later, that was the most traumatic moment of my life. It’s still the image I see when I’m trying to fall asleep. The genocide didn’t begin until many years later, when I was twenty-five years old. I was a soldier in the army. I could tell the atmosphere was growing more and more tense. Our commanders were openly using ethnic slurs. There was talk of ‘wiping our enemies from this country.’ One night I was assigned to guard four Tutsi prisoners. They’d been accused of making explosives but were clearly innocent civilians. They’d been tortured. Their wounds were rotten and stinking. A major came to the cell at 1AM and ordered me to step aside. ‘These people need to be killed immediately,’ he said. But I refused. I told him those were not my instructions. He pushed and screamed, but eventually he stormed off. The prisoners were released a few days later, but someone followed them out and killed them. It was a sign of things to come.”
(Kigali, Rwanda)
secretive dreams 