It is hard being back. Sensory overload would be a stab in the right direction but a phrase that comes painfully short of the confusion in my mind. Walking up 5th Avenue, exhausted, my mind doesn’t know what is going on as it undergoes a mental marathon, a grueling test of endurance and contrast. With each step, I get a second farther away from my work this summer, friends, a burgeoning slum with no end in sight, a place of eternal contradiction where smiles and destitution tango to the rhythm of 90s rap lyrics.

Fatigue is not the reason I stumble forward but rather a jet-lagged mental incompetence, no way of reconciling the disconnect between what I am living now and was living 48 hours ago.

Herein lies the problem, the true challenge to vitriolic blog postings, grand notions of social activism, and self congratulating college groups: how do I mend that gap, live in the U.S. knowing what I know? Slogan t-shirts are one thing, but consistent lifestyle is another, telling of a commitment to an idea that goes beyond the hip Urban Outfitters version of its commercialized self, somewhere uncomfortable at some point.

It is hard being back. I ask myself, well aware of the problems that face some people, one small community in a specific city, what am I going to do about it? Better yet, what am I going to live about it? Truthfully, I am a little afraid of the answer because I know it is a lot easier not to.

Aaron Charlop - Powers