fuku

Did I mention I've been reading a lot? I kept telling people I was reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which apparently is easy to mishear as "Oscar Wilde". Then we would have a rather confusing conversation until I specified what I was reading was written by Junot Diaz. Anyway, Oscar WAO is definitely worth checking out. 

Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children, and fortune believes in God. Belicia was, if it was possible, was even more susceptible to the Casanova Wave than many of her peers. Our girl was straight boycrazy. (To be called boycrazy in a country like Santo Domingo is a singular distinction; it means you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average northamericana to cinders).
 

The Mongoose [is] one of the great unstable particles of the Universe and also one of its greatest travelers. Accompanied humanity out of Africa and after a long furlough in India jumped ship to the other India, aka the Carribean. Since its earliest appearance in the written record - 675 BCE, in a nameless scribe's letter to Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon - the Mongoose has proven itself to be an enemy of kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies. Believed to be an ally of Man. Many Watchers suspect that the Mongoose arrived to our world from another, but to date no evidence of such a migration has been unearthed. 
 

I would have disappeared. Like my father disappeared on my mother and was never seen again. Disappeared like everything disappears. Without a trace. I would have lived far away. I would have been happy, I'm sure of it, and I would never have had any children. I would have let myself grow dark in the sun, no more hiding from it, let my hair indulge in all its kinks, and she would have passed me on the street and never recognized me. That was the dream I had. But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in. 

All quotations from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007).