Refugee Kids Know

Refugee kids know how to make things last. If the remote comes with plastic stickers to protect its face, you don’t remove that. If the remote doesn’t come with protection you saran wrap it yourself. If you’re lucky you have an uncle in retail and you can borrow his hot shrink wrap gun for maximum svelteness. (Yo, you’re living with that plastic wrap til it erodes might as well try to make it look as pretty as possible.)  Refugee kids get an unusual amount of joy from touching buttons directly, that tactile sensation of knowing you can afford a replacement a few years down the line if your finger oils done ruin everything.  

(20 years later and you're a lavishly paid tech geek and you rip the plastic off everything.  You don’t even keep the instruction manuals anymore.)

Refugee kids know that textbooks are expensive as hell.  But they also know the price of an education.  If you can, you find a friend you can double up on a used book with.  You study together or trade off books every other day or week, whatever your test schedule is like.  You get really good at reselling things.  You learn the best way to stretch your pennies is not to buy the shittiest condition book, but to buy the VeryGood+ books.  If you're careful not to highlight anything, if you keep them as is, you can resell it for 80% of the price.  Your friend thinks you’re missing out (“when I highlight it’s easier to come back to the main points”) but you’ve built up a near-eidetic memory for survival reasons so you never felt the loss. Underlines cost money.

(20 years later and you think about how you have more unread books than read books in your personal library.  How most of them could be sold at New/Mint because you've never even opened them and cracked the spine.)

refugee kids know the only thing you can be outwardly depressed about is death. you don’t cry over bad grades skinned knees classmates judging your jeans and definitely not crushes or heartbreak - why are you even thinking about love at a time like this? you’re supposed to be learning your craft your trade your profession. look the family is gonna need your income and more important than that they are gonna need to know that you’ll be able to take care of yourself and your siblings if they die. they need to know that they didn’t risk life and limb and home for nothing. the thoughts that kept them going on the darkest nights on that leaky boat was that you’d be here and you’d prosper and you'd be safe safe safe so give them that peace of mind alright. your grandmother talks in low whispers of her friend that made it to america only to lose both her children in a car accident - might as well have died in camp she says.

(20 years later and you're safe, everyone's safe.  but you wonder why your depression amidst all this safety feels like betrayal.  why stepping away from a lucrative career to make music feels like betrayal.  you wonder if you did enough to live up to those dreams that kept your folks alive on the boat.)