When I meet people for the first time, I always put on my glasses because I feel like that’s a little something extra between me and them. It’s like the Laurence Dunbar poem “We Wear the Mask.”
To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize.
She cannot stay out of duty. The things one does, one should do out of love.
That night, I slept hugging my secret.
There are loves that outlive lovers.
They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?
May your love remain an eternal flame.
And they shared, as she put it, an impractical love.
I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.
Our faith is a mishmash of many things. We believe in family, in music and art, but we mostly believe in each other” -Giselle.
God grant us the courage to change those things we can, the serenity to accept the things we can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Your son is my friend,“... “He is my very terrible and imperfect and dear friend.
On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.
We are all bodies, but the dying body starts decaying right before our eyes. And those narratives that tell us what it’s like to live, and die, inside those bodies are helpful to all of us, because no matter how old we are, our bodies never stop being mysterious to us.
Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.
I didn’t feel guilty about burning my mother’s name anymore. I knew my hurt and hers were links in a long chain and if she hurt me, it was because she was hurt, too.
She said the lottery was like love. Providence was not with her, but she was patient.
Still, she heard herself say, “Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.
She remembers him once telling her that inside the Marie-Jeanne cave, sounds carry weight and travel in waves strong enough to possibly crack some of the most fragile karst. She imagines herself standing at the lowest depths of this cave, in the Abyss, and hearing again what he whispered in her ear during their wedding dance. One thing, MJ This is our one thing now.
Maybe we’re all dying, one breath at a time.
I felt broken at the end of the meeting, but a little closer to being free.