Free Ride
While walking to get a soda under the grilling merciless sun, I saw a border patrol SUV stopped by a red light. I was on my way to the Mexican border of Juarez then, and I contemplated for a second hitching a ride from them. I only needed to tell them I was illegal for them to deport me?
Yet, it’s not so much the cab ride I would have saved that lured me to think this way. It was a morbid curiosity to be inside a vehicle impregnated with so much fear and shattered dreams; these derived from those who perhaps invested their life’s savings to come this far. And the heartbreak to see these dreams evanesce like vapor into thin air.
It would be like playing with fire with the knowledge one is safe from scarring. There was a time when I was afraid of those border patrol cars. Yet, it was only for a short while, when I was nine years old and spent three nights in a cheap Tijuana motel room, my two little brothers and I.
We were waiting for the people to cross us, when on the second night of ambiguity, and worry, one cried and said that he was scared, to which I replied: “It will be alright; you will see. Don’t you cry.” I faked a bravado I was far from feeling at nine yrs old, still unaware of all the potential dangers and pitfalls.
I think it’s important to be able to step in someone else’s shoes, if only for a moment. To jolt one from the complacency one can be trapped in, and surely be thankful for what did not befall one. Perhaps it would be a bit too much to request to sit on the electric chair of a Texas jail and imagine the moment one knows with due certainty one is about to expire. What goes through their mind at such a moment?
Oh, the human well of suffering. Is it palpable on the walls of the Auschwitz gas chambers? Did people embrace naked and terrified, as the life force slowly drifted away? Which was worse? To be trapped in there, or seeing a loved one marched to such fate? How much pain can man bear?
We are both stopped by a red light under the merciless Texas sun. I see the Border Patrol men inside their air conditioned vehicle. Perhaps it’s the only available job they found in this unstable economy? Do they turn off their emotions when performing their duties? When the little American children beg them with tears, not to deport their parents?
The light is green and the moment is passed. I make my way to the border town. I will cross the invisible line created by man, as sharp as a blade that cuts a paper in half.
This divides two distinct lines between race, idioms, and comfort of life. Making one an illegal alien by this abstract line created by brothers.
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