you can’t leave a war once you’ve been, you can only keep it at bay—which

she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore. Dene wants to tell him it’s what happened to Native people,

Or we only think we’re used to it until the shooter, until we meet him in real life, when he’s there with us, the shots will come from everywhere,

If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have

It’s a secret she holds so tight to her chest she never notices it.

The quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn’t read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.

the woman inside impatiently waves Opal across like she’s doing all of humanity a favor.

But is it a game? Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks they’re winning when they say “Get over it.”

hope that in closing our eyes we might wake up to that other life, back on the other side of the screen, where we can watch from the safety of our couches and bedrooms, from bus and train seats, from our offices, anyplace that is not there, on the ground, playing like we’re dead so not playing at all, we’ll run like ghosts from our own dead bodies