“I don’t want to be another one of those people who just pretend like they don’t know about the suffering, like they don’t see it every single day, like they don’t walk past it on their way to school or work.”
“At that point in my life, I had encountered death only in fiction. I had heard about other people’s relatives dying. But I had never seen death up close. I had never held it.”
“Soon enough, my cousin feels alive again. His voice rings in my ear, and his face floats in the paper just beyond his words where he swam in the kind of feelings and thoughts most people spend their lives trying to mask from others or from themselves.”
“But I need to know more. I need to know what happened to my cousin. Maybe only for the sake of knowing- but maybe because I need to hear that it wasn’t my fault.”