i awoke feeling that i still had to help them
11.12.03 9:51 a.m.

My parents and I used to take road trips a lot. We would go on camping trips up and down the east coast.

Quite recently we took a trip down to North Carolina. While we were there we kept seeing a woman that was selling a lot of alternative-based products, but no rice toilet paper. Before that first meeting, I never knew what toilet paper was normally made out of. However my parents, being specific about certain things, decided that the toilet paper was their desired good. It was unavailable.

We kept on without the toilet paper. We went down to Georgia. There the people seemed unchanged. The children kept repeating stories of staying away from the senile ones, when all they really meant were the black children.

I was beginning to find it unbearable. My first impression of Georgia had been that it was so warm and welcoming. It welcomed my body to shed the many layers of clothing I was still wearing from the car ride that took us into the south. And now it was making me nauseous.

I turned to my parents to ask if we could get on their way. They agreed that we had spent more than enough time there. We started to walk down a dirt path, a wide path, and there we saw the lady again, just behind a group of children listening to a boy go on about the senile ones. She noticed us first and when my mom looked at her, she was already answering that she still did not have the rice toilet paper.

We kept on and met a group of people. This is where our trip got a little tricky. I was speaking to someone and they continued through a door. The man I was speaking to also needed to be on his way, so we opened a door into a building, a shortcut. But it was all closed up inside, only that one door led into it. We must have taken the wrong door. We went back out. Still no sign of my parents.

We started calling them- Mama! Tato! It echoed back at me. I opened another door and kept shouting. I walked through the house and was shouting. I held no regard for the inhabitants. The man and his wife were still with me- they were also yelling Mama! Tato! Our voices were growing impatient with each syllable.

An answer. First a little girl and then I hear more voices. Among them are my parents. They are in the basement. But the man that owns the house is coming back and we need to get them out somehow.