One Hundred Days

In the span of one hundred days into a newly minted presidency, as headlines ribbon across the screen to broadcast this threshold, you try, instead, to think of all the other one hundred days that exist all around you. In that time, a single egg could attach to uterine lining, could develop to the size of a single plum, could already begin quivering with the feathered veins of a new heart. Within a hundred days, minus the weekends, you could earn a certificate for a new job that could transform your life. In that amount of time, three full moons will pass, each heavier than the last—a milky Scorpio moon to howl at the stars, an independent Taurus moon to teach us how to fall in love with solitude, a Capricorn moon to teach us how to walk beneath her white glow alone. The lifespan of butternut squash and beans—just one sister short of the ancestral trio—takes an average of one hundred days from seed, to flower, to harvest.

In one hundred days, you could reward one hundred students with visas for an education, or you could swipe them away, instead. Within one hundred days, you’ll have driven with Alejandro across the country for a new fellowship, promising to explore the Twin Cities together—just before he receives the order to leave it. In that time, approximately three months, he will have entered his graduating semester, earned his pharmaceutical technician license, just in time to lose it by the end. There would have been a morning, in all of this, where he would have risen from his pillow for the last time. By now, his family will have stripped the linens clean, replaced his pillows, and made the space feel entirely brand new.

In Minnesota, you track more headlines—one girl has burrowed into her student apartment, afraid to go to class after having her visa revoked. In another state, a battery of neighbors lock elbows to protect a mother and sister within their nucleus. On the highways bridging Minneapolis, you watch protests grow from one person to entire crowds. You witness your fledgling marriage turn into static and blurred Whatsapp calls, Alejandro’s stifled sobs in a narrow Juarez bathroom slowly turning into shifts at call centers answering lines for a North Carolina glass company—in the very towns he’d met your family, had walked through your childhood one country road at a time.

By the end of these one hundred days, you’ll get selfies from your old RA classmates, the caps on their heads, the rainbow of ribbon skirts tucked beneath graduation robes. Halfway through this timespan, Alejandro will have paid for graduation fees, will have received email notifications for the next steps: This graduation ceremony will take place at Tingley Coliseum on Saturday, May 17^th @ 12pm. Now that you’ve RSVP’d to participate, it is time to purchase your cap and gown for your big day!

But, like so many others, he will have already been long gone.

Brianna G. Reed is a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts.