When I worked in a Mexican restaurant alongside the wall in Berlin, there were no Mexicans. The owners were from Texas and the employees from all over Europe, mostly Spain. I sifted through the beans for stones, peeled avocadoes, chopped onions, and after work fed the owners’ parrot pistachios. I rode my bike alongside the wall to bars and gazed at the graffiti. My favorite was an image of an angel emerging from a blue shell.

Once my friend Michi and I crossed the border to East Germany’s gray streets. The buildings were covered in soot, and a lone playground on concrete had a swing structure, rusty, no children. Michi said, “I wouldn’t even want my father to live here, and I hate my father.” I turned to her and took her hand. On the way back, we stopped at a station with a drunk, skinny woman drinking schnapps on a green bench. “Get out, you pigs,” she said.

Now I live in another country with a wall. The skies in this desert are as blue as that shell, but the angel left long ago. I do not know where she went.

Bio: Kika Dorsey