We all have the same dream, my grandmother says. To live equal in a country that’s supposed to be the land of the free. She lets out a long breath, deep remembering.
Who hasn’t walked through a life of small tragedies?
Guess that’s where the tears came from, knowing that there’s so much in this great big world that you don’t have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you’ll have one less heartbreak in your life.
Y’all know how much I love you? “Infinity and back again,” I say the way I’ve said it a million times. And then, daddy says to me, “go on and add a little bit more to that.
Maybe, I am thinking, there is something hidden like this, in all of us. A small gift from the universe waiting to be discovered.
For God so loved the world, their father would say, he gave his only begotten son. But what about his daughters, I wondered. What did God do with his daughters?
I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame – of everything.
She felt red at the bone – like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding.
Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone – adults promising us their own failed futures.
This earth is seventy percent water. Hard not to walk into it.
There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death’s enormity.
If someone had taken that book out of my hand said, You’re too old for this maybe I’d never have believed that someone who looked like me could be in the pages of the book that someone who looked like me had a story.
And as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home.
Some evenings I don’t know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.
In downtown Greenville, they painted over the WHITE ONLY signs, except on the bathroom doors, they didn’t use a lot of paint so you can still see the words, right there like a ghost standing in front still keeping you out.
Does it sound crazy to say I looked at her and saw the world falling into some kind of order that I didn’t even know it was out of?
If this moment was a sentence, I’d be the period.
Look how beautifully black we are. And as we dance, I am not Melody who is sixteen, I am not my parents’ once illegitimate daughter – I am a narrative, someone’s almost forgotten story. Remembered.
I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone?
He loved October. Had always loved it. There was something sad and beautiful about it – the ending and beginning of things.