When the sun goes down, small critters come out to play, feasting on your skin. You either stay at home watching young cousins play video games or go out to your culture’s grand traditional way of a birthday party, swaying to cumbias, corridos, and banda. The streets are always covered in a fine layer of dust and the vehicles behind you are stuck trying to see past your clouds of chaos. A pair of recent graduates die in a car crash caused when they were too high to see past those clouds. The year was 2015 and your sister’s boyfriend knew them. Only those closest to them remember their good qualities; everyone else glorifies some person they never met or bad mouths the long gone for ruining a front lawn, judging their ‘bad decisions,’ not caring that they never had a chance to live.

Your guelita is always eating that pink sugar-coated sweet bread that your tía brings over from the other side of the river because your guelo isn’t here anymore to walk her over the bridge to get some. And because the guilt of his death consumes her, she never stops eating those sweets; her sugar rises, her figure grows plumper, and the disease your mother tried so hard for her not to get has finally won over. All those Easters and Christmases and Halloweens are in the past and you just want everyone to get better.

You pray every night to a saint you don’t really know you believe in so that those monsters in your head won’t ever rot you away. You struggle with your mental health and you can’t tell your favorite cousin in fear they’ll judge you due to cultural beliefs. Depression and anxiety aren’t real, and you just need to grow up.

You can see your old school mates become college students, go on to get their Masters, go on to become parents; they come home for break and have stories to tell. They say that this place never changes, that it never evolves. Yet when they’ve been away for so long they don’t know the little things that have changed over time. It may not be so noticeable to them that our small bordertown is a historic national landmark and that those before us have uplifted us in order to pursue our dreams. We come from a unique background, straddling two borders, two cultural ideologies; slowly becoming Americanized in all the ways our parents vowed never to let us assimilate into a society that belittles our values, our existence.

When you go to drop off your older sister for her first year of college someone calls your traditional breakfast tacos ‘burritos’ with a gringa accent and you can’t help but laugh; then immediately regret. It’s not their fault. They don’t know any better. After all, they weren’t raised by the magical delta. All you can do is pray for those that refer to melted cheese as kay-so. They want so badly to take your traditions, whitewash them, clean of your culture’s impurities.

All the elderly around here respectfully mourn those who pass before their time and you watch them pray for the souls of so many under the shade of trees in their front lawns. The old men sit in highchairs and sleep with an old baseball cap their nephews had bought for them while the wrinkle-faced women tend the weeds and pretty, potted plants. Even then, as you lie under that shade, the sun’s heat waves are burning blisters onto your skin and you want to scream. You want to get out of your clothes, get out of your skin. Even in the winter the heat never stops, and you see social network statuses of some girl you went to college with on a vacation to Hawaii. She can afford it because they have found oil on her father’s land.

You find out over summer break, after your first year of college, that your childhood friend had an abortion and you’re the fourth person to know. You hate yourself for not being able to physically be there for her during her struggle, having to hide it from the world. You can’t let it get to you; you need to be strong for her. You need to remember the trust and love that bonds you. You must never put more value on the harder memories.

Remember the days that you laughed even after you’ve broken their ama’s best chair. Remember the friends that threw a surprise party for your birthday two weeks late, made you climb the roof when they knew you’re scared of heights then watch the sun go down as it shined into your eyes realizing you have to seize the life before you.

Living in this border town is like being under that piercing sun. You want to leave; you need an escape. I’ve been wanting to run ever since I can remember, but the sun is burning the town’s brand onto my back. I will carry these memories and experiences with me. I will always come home. Because I can walk to my front lawn and I can smell the jasmines that my mother took from her childhood home and carried them to my room to reduce my stress levels. I can walk down my street and see the times I sold Girl Scout cookies; Samoas, the ones whose name changed to ‘Caramel Delights.’ I can hear my grandma saying Que Dios te bendiga instead of ‘Goodbye.’ I can feel the maza warm in my hand as I stand around a crowded table making tamales for Christmas. I can taste them, too.

I can go into my room knowing that it’s small and cramped, that maybe it gets too cold for my taste during the winter. But my home soothes the ache and pain of the mistreatment and hardships, struggles and hypocrisy that comes with this town that make Roma the place I would never change.

Each year over three hundred million tennis balls are manufactured globally. Very few of those used in America are recycled, which annually results in over one hundred million tennis balls consigned to US landfills. But two, at least, have escaped that fate.

A woman, who suddenly reminds you of Venus Williams, grabs a pair of tennis balls from a canvas bag, balances them on her lap and then takes out a box cutter from the pocket of her teal-colored uniform. Your legs dangle over the side of the bed as you wriggle your toes encased in hospital-issue footies. A searing pain fries your low back beneath the stitches where the neurosurgeon has opened you up and closed you. You wince, distorting your face but discounting the pain. You’ll do anything to get back on your feet.

The uniformed woman tells you take it easy. She has deftly slashed an X in the neon balls and then opens the metal frame of a walker. Your walker. She pushes it toward you. She leans down and sticks the fuzzy yellow orbs onto the walker’s rear legs, a bumper car for the elderly.

In Henry V, his archenemy the Dauphin, sends the king a barrel of tennis balls, implying that Henry was a softy. That gift of tennis balls marks the beginning of the Hundred Years War.

Early in your marriage, you battled your husband on the courts of Duck Creek Park, but you never beat him. Him and his dinks and chips and lazy lobs. You would rather he show a display of force. You would rather slam from the baseline and groan every time your strings met the ball. You would rather crawl down the corridor on your hands and knees, dragging your IV pole like a Roman cross, than use the walker with the big yellow balls. You’re rehabbing after back surgery, damnit, not heading for the nursing home.

Tennis balls are hollow spheres filled with gas. Each one is pressurized so that there’s actually more stress on the inside of the ball than on the outside.

The surgeon flipped on the screen and showed you an MRI of what happened. Just above your tailbone, the silver river of your spine is interrupted by L4 collapsed over L5. Spondylolisthesis Stage lV (the worst). The sorry result of a rogue wave that jackhammered your body the day you knew you should never have gotten into the water, but you went in anyway. You left the doctor’s office convinced you could heal yourself. You didn’t need surgery—so you went to the chiropractor and downed turmeric and fish oil. You stretched your hamstrings and sat on tennis balls to awaken your glutes. But the pain and numbness kept getting worse. And then you weren’t able to walk to the post office. And then you weren’t able to walk.

You called your husband, sobbing into the cell phone to come pick you up. Neither of you spoke on the drive home, and you wished he would just tell you what to do. But he didn’t.

Tennis balls are covered in felt. If tennis balls weren’t fuzzy, they’d zip through the air so quickly that they’d make the sport nearly impossible to play.

You are wobbly on your feet. Venus tells you slow down, take your time. You’ve been given that advice all your life. But it’s your nature to forge ahead. You tip the walker to the right, swish the privacy curtain and take three steps fast. You imagine yourself hurtling over the handles, a child flung over a bike. Until—the rear legs with the optic yellow fuzzballs grip the linoleum under your stockinged feet. Steadied, you stop. Mustering a modicum of dignity, you inch the walker forward, step by step, slower this time, under Venus’ watchful eye.

Since 2015, old balls that have lost their bounce may be placed into reBounces^TM bins to be recycled. These balls will be re-pressurized and given new life to bounce back for another game.

Patience is not a trait you’ve been blessed with. In this instance though, it may help. That’s what you’re thinking the next morning you wake up. No longer tethered to the IV pole, you thrust your feet into your slip-on Keds and head down the corridor, pushing your walker along the polished floor, trying to hold your head high.

After you’ve passed the nurse’s station, you return to your room, flushed from the effort but slightly triumphant. Sitting in the corner is your husband, waiting for you with your food tray. As you glide towards him, he says nice balls, in his soft and slow kind of way.

Don’t you just love it when the past twenty years of repressed biculturalism and internalized racism vomit themselves up in the middle of Free Day at the Denver Art Museum? I sure do.

There was a temporary exhibit, “Linking Trade,” examining the cultural influence of the Silk Road on surrounding regions, with artworks across Asia spanning 2,500 years. Now I could go on for pages about the influences that occurred during the era, the melding of cultures through dialog, cross symbolism, and adaptive art styles.

But most importantly (obviously) it related to me, and had me thinking of history and humanity, art and antiquities, alliteration and appropriation, the typical stuff.

It was personally exciting because Indian culture and history was represented, not as some Apu facsimile or fetishized yoga class (as it so often is in Granola Town, CO), but just...as is. After two decades of museum visits to see renowned portraits of dead old white guys or Euro-centric history, I got to see my culture, how ever disengaged from it I am, represented in a dignified way. It’s very odd to see the history to which you technically belong presented back to you within the lens of the culture you grew up in. It brought a deep sense of irony, both populationally and personally; and I just can’t resist trying to bumble my way through what I think it means.

Museums have this amazing ability to both highlight the eminence of a culture or time, and (through keeping these artifacts of culture or time in hermetically sealed trophy cases) highlight its brevity. I was astonished at the amount of seemingly everyday items that were on display: everything from bowls to knives and teacups. Yes, they all had beautiful craftsmanship, but beyond being pretty to look at, they were deemed important purely because they were old. Kind of like the Queen.

It made me wonder, 3000 years from now what will be on display? (Assuming humanity hasn’t collapsed by that point.) What will be the remnants of our zeitgeist? The dove? The peace symbol? Perhaps the numerous memorials we have to revolutionary leaders? Or maybe just Kim Kardashian’s ass? (Hey, it would make sense, silicone lasts forever.)

Further, why do we enjoy looking at old things in the first place? Simply to learn about history and the people that came before us? Or are we lying to ourselves, and we just do it to seem smarter? Or to connect to some fundamental truth about humanity? About culture?

I think it’s the latter, and there was one artifact that really made me realize that. (Cue back to that whole biculturalism and internalized racism schtick.) This piece, a sandstone statue of the warrior goddess Durga, spoke to me. (If world religion were a comic book, Durga would be Wonder Woman.) Now I’m not religious, I have a very basic knowledge of Hindu-Indian culture and religion from the failed attempts of my parents to put me through the Indian equivalent of Sunday school. Yes, I’ve visited the homeland every four years or so since I was born. I’ve been to temple after temple, berated by the elderly that I have no reverence for my homeland. In fact, I’ve seen statues of the same goddess in temples older than Christ among my people during the holiday that celebrates Durga. And I felt nothing.

But this statue? The statue locked in a glass case while a bunch of white liberals exclaim their fascination while humble bragging about the time they “Eat Pray Love”-ed their way across New Delhi and it, like, totally changed their lives? This is where I suddenly feel a deep and spiritual connectedness to my people?!

Something about seeing this badass warrior goddess, worshipped by millions of people, locked in a box for people to glance at really spoke to me. How often had I felt trapped in a box, while my predominately white town looks at me purely for my surface level “Indianess,” purely to feel more worldly and exotic, but never taking the time to actually read my backstory or placard? Certainly, I doubt the original intent of making this statue was to allow an angsty first generation Indian-America kid to project all her feelings of cultural dichotomy onto this inanimate object, but it happened, nonetheless. The big difference between this statue and the one in the temple was that this one was just like me: out of place.

That’s why I found it so wonderfully frustrating trying to suss out what these pieces mean, in general and to me. Are they art or antiquity? Are they a testament to the stubbornness of human culture to stand the test of time, to remain relevant millennia after your peak of prosperity through the production of art? Or is it a reflection of the fragility of power—that every culture will end up as nothing more than museum pieces one day? Or does it allow us to connect and examine deeply the idea of being part of a culture, part of humanity? Ultimately, to both make and appreciate these antiquities is an art in of itself. It transforms an ancient reverence for the present to a physical history. As, seemingly with every piece of art, this exhibition’s meaning is unique to each consumer.

At the very least, this exhibit prompted at least one angsty yuppie to think beyond the problems of this century: to be amazed at the sheer combination of power and fallacy in the human race and the never-ending complexity of what it means to belong. (All while wondering which knockoffs are available in the gift shop.)