Hello, Goodbye, Hello

art by Thomas Vogt

by Adam Peterson

                                                                       

 

 

That the dream of the new world was another’s nightmare—

We were taught not to worry too much about that, and now it’s our nightmare.

People arrive on our shores from across the ocean. They plant flags in our malls and rename our restaurants like they discovered them. But we did! And we told all of our friends smugly about them as if they should have already known.

What a strange new world this is, these new colonizers say while seizing all of our favorite potato chips and throwing handfuls of glass beads at us.

What the fuck, we say, this sucks.

HELLO, the colonizers yell in our faces. HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. Then they laugh with their friends about how violent and primitive we are just because we punch a fast food restaurant in frustration.

They call the fast food restaurant NEW NEW AMERICA CLOWN TOWN, and when we try to explain that’s a stupid name, they only laugh harder and pass us bottles of cheap brandy. When we take them, they say this seals a treaty that gives them ownership of both Dakotas.

This we could live with, but it still kind of sucks. The brandy, we mean. We once stocked our homes with obscure liqueurs and cocktail guides that the colonists seized under the name of some king we’re pretty sure they’re making up.

Understand. They’re not entirely wrong. Not about us. We are violent and primitive. We are incapable of taking care of ourselves. We do have bad taste in music.

But none of that gives them the right to start shooting all the lions in our zoos and trading their fur back-and-forth on an equities market.

What did we make of this place we stole?

No one can quite seem to remember, and it makes for the best argument the colonizers have.

YOU, they say, NEED. OUR. HELP.

 And because they’re here, we do. We work their jobs and eat their food. Our babies wear their names. A woman who used to be a surgeon becomes a hero for guiding them safely through our subway system. Teenagers begin to dress like them and sneer at us for our old-fashioned yoga pants.

That’s what does it. Time to go.

If our forefathers risked everything to cross an ocean, we can too. Sure, they probably knew knots and how to start fires, what to do about bears. But that doesn’t matter. Our hearts carry a dream of another land.

It worked out before, so why not forever?

We walk till we reach the water, then we swim then we drown.

The spirits we meet look upon us with wonder and fear.

You’re doing it all wrong, we say, and begin to teach them the proper way not to live.

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