I felt brave all of a sudden. Yeah, maybe it was just a stupid and immature school yard fight. Or maybe it was the most important moment of my life. Maybe I was telling the world that I was no longer a human target.
But epics are rarely honest, and honesty should never be epic.
And that’s when I knew that I was going to be okay.
It’s one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they’re the hugest words in the world when they’re put together. You can do it.
Of course, you can’t lie forever. Lies have short shelf lives. Lies go bad. Lies rot and stink up the joint.
Hell, sometimes it feels like the whole country is on fire. Like a constant conflagration is burning too close to all poor people. Shouldn’t rich-ass America be taking care of everybody?
That’s just a fancy way of calling me a liar,” I said. “If the moccasin fits, then wear it,” she said.
If you can catch crazy, I’m a walking epidemic.
They’re not starving to death, but they look hollow-eyed and barren, like they’ve been fed just enough food but never enough happiness.
She’d been a resourceful thief, a narcissistic Robin Hood who stole a rich education from white people and kept it.
All the anger in the world has come to my house. It’s there in my closet. In my refrigerator. In the water. In the sheets. It’s in my clothes. Can you smell it? I can never run away from it. It’s in my hair. I can feel it between my teeth. Can you taste it? I hear it all the time. All the time the anger is talking to me. It’s the devil. I’m the devil. If I could I’d crawl into a hole if I knew God was in there. Where’s the hole?
Do you understand how one small dog – afraid of the wolves who had attacked him and those who would attack him anew – might stand on his hind legs, might evolve in a moment, so he could run away and never return?
But people forget.
Indian boys weren’t supposed to dream like that. And white girls from small towns weren’t supposed to dream big, either.
My profanity has an aesthetic.
We shuffled past white customers who stared at us with hate, pity, disgust, and anger – the Four Horsemen of the Anti-Indian Apocalypse.
Branch by branch, Rowdy and I climbed toward the top of the tree, to the bottom of the sky.
Even Crazy Horse, the famous Oglala warrior, was named for his father. But nobody called him Junior, for rather logical reasons. “Look! There’s the most feared and mysterious Indian of all time! Behold! It is Junior!
Jesus, I thought, is there a better and more succinct definition of grief than It hurts a little to breathe, but we’re okay?
Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.