2:40 p.m. in Ann Arbor
2:40 p.m. in Ann Arbor is a pocket of reverie with seams of silence ripping through. There are no birds in the sky today. Just flocks of maize, tie dyes, bare midriffs, shorts with holes at the top of a fleshy leg poking out to say hello. Old men walk with old women. One old woman’s daughter walks with her boyfriend. They’re walking, sipping, laughing.
On the diag, young officers of the navy, the air force, the marines, and the army encircle the flag, which flies low at half mast. “Flies” overstates it. There is no wind. The cadets hold a stoic vigil with the air. Neither entity blinks or moves. No one expects anything to happen today, but they are all ready. Just in case. You’re supposed to “never forget…” I wave my hands before the men in uniform and they look through me. Back home, when you pray for something, you walk in circles around an idol in the temple. I circle the flag, but none of the soldiers pay me mind.
Another wave of maize floods the ground. Grandmothers, grandfathers, grandbabies in onesies with a bejeweled letter “M.” Over there, someone coughs, someone laughs, someone cries. The sun is screened by the clouds today. They come out to protect the tall buildings. Out of respect, I take my coffee Americano. There are café people and there are party people outside. The café people wear Airpods and sit with their laptops open. It’s bright despite the overcast, and they cannot see their screens. So they look at the party people instead. The party people walk in groups of three or more and they are loud. They don’t look back at the café folk. Today, on September 11, 2021, Michigan will play Washington and America will win.The café shares seating with a Joe’s Pizza that’s giving out free cheese slices. Ann Arbor is the only city where Joe’s exists outside New York. The young people sit on the grass opposite the psychology building. Some fold their pizza, others tear into it from below. None think about anything but the food before them, it’s beautiful. A squirrel chases another by the shrubs behind me. A fly soars in and out of my coffee mug. What does it mean to be free like this? I see brown people and white people, both walking the same spaces. But if you look closely, they are always in their own groups, never the same cluster. Though close, they walk at a painful distance from one another.
2,996 people dead. 2,996 flags planted on the ground around us. 4 guards. 1 spangled banner planted in the sky. 108,345 will fill the stadium today to cheer their team. Nothing more American than football and the never forgotten.
About the Author
Divya Manikandan is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied Health and English. She hopes to go to medical school one day and keep writing about the world around her. Her work has been published in The Lookout Journal, Earth Island Journal, The Scarlet Leaf Review, Off Assignment, Auxocardia, and many more.
Read Divya’s “Letter to a Stranger” here.
Illustration by Victoria Lu.
Edited by Stephan Sveshnikov.
