But this grief, for all its awful weight, insists that he matters. What we carry of Roger and Demond and CJ and Ronald says they matter. I have written only the nuggets of my friends‘ lives. This story is only a hint of what my brother‘s life was worth, more than the 19 years he lived, more than the 13 years he‘s been dead. It is worth more than I can say. And there‘s my dilemma, because all I can do in the end is say.
In those years I was in awe of the bravery I saw around me. I never quite felt brave myself then, but I watched a lot of fearless things happen. I could play at bravery in the songs, I could play sexiness or humor, long before I could actually be or embody any of those things... But they formed a big part and a foundation for a lot of girls who had been undone by invisibility, including myself.
Any work of art, whether it be literature, art or anything in between, is an aggregation of influences and inspirations. If context within a story is crucial, then just as crucial is the context beyond the page. To consider both is to see a clearer, fuller picture of the books you love.
This, maybe, was the worst part: the whole world was out to kill you both. Your bodies have always been abject. You were dropped from the boat of the world, climbed onto a piece of driftwood together, and after a perfunctory period of pleasure and safety, she tried to drown you. And so you aren‘t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal.
Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.
Why did you come to the United States? Perhaps no one knows the real answer. I know that migrants, when they are still on their way here, learn the Immigrant's Prayer. A friend who had been aboard La Bestia for a few days, working on a documentary, read it to me once. I didn't learn the entire thing, but I remember these lines: 'Partir es morir un poco / Llegar nunca es llegar' - 'To leave is to die a little / To arrive is never to arrive.
I was born happy but when anything that is large, alive, and wild gets hurt and confused, I feel so sad, and I notice that I wish I could nurse big scared things. And it is worth mentioning that “big scared thing” is one way to describe how my heart often feels. My heart can feel like an elephant who is feeling dread and has an exceptional memory and naturally possesses something valuable that might be hunted, poached, wasted.
Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners.
•
Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.
I can dress and daub when psychotic. I do it with zeal when manic. If I‘m depressed, I skip everything but the lipstick. If I skip the lipstick that means I haven‘t even made it to the bathroom mirror.
After all, it is easy to forget that psychiatric diagnoses are human constructs, not handed down from an all-knowing God on stone tablets; to “have schizophrenia” is to fit an assemblage of symptoms, which are listed in a purple book made by humans.
I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112 lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else. I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.
In a book, all would have gone according to plan... but life was so fucking untidy — what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?
I guessed Mamá was giving her the same warnings I had received...not to pick up its flowers, not to sit underneath, not to stand by it too long & most important, not to let neighbors know we ourselves were afraid of it. The Drunken Tree made our neighbors nervous. Who‘s to say why Mamá decided to grow that tree in her garden? It may have been that long mean streak in her or it may have been because she was always saying you couldn‘t trust anyone.
And Lot‘s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people & their homes had been. But she did look back, & I love her for that, because it was so human.
So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.
People aren‘t supposed to look back. I‘m certainly not going to do it anymore. I‘ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, & had to be since it was written by a pillar of salt.
If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.
We sang at the chapel annexed to the home every morning. We understood that this was the humans' moon, the place for howling beyond purpose. Not for mating, not for hunting, not for fighting, not for anything but the sound itself. And we'd howl along with the choir, hurling every pitted thing within us at the stained glass.
Maybe you are right to be cautious. You have been lied to before, after all. Your heart is weathered & scarred, mishandled by many, eroded by time. You‘re no dummy & yet repeatedly, you stumble over the cracks of your cobblestone heart, you let your naked foolish hopes get the better of you. Perhaps every can of cashews has a fake snake lurking, but you keep opening them, stupidly, because in your heart of hearts, you still believe in cashews.
The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time. But it is impossible to prove. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.
As we acted upon our society, we acted upon ourselves; as we changed the world we changed our minds... We moved in a brief span of time from a sense that there was something wrong with us to the realization that there was something radically wrong with the society that had done its best to destroy us... We experienced the present as history, ourselves as history makers.
But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.
You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it?
There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It's just a matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.
•
You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.
•
The half life of love is forever.
She asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. “It is true,” he replied, ”but you would do well not to believe it.”
•
When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end.
Maybe I shouldn‘t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway... I‘d thrown up scallops and Percodan on him the night before in the emergency room. I thought it would be impolite to refuse to give him my number. He probably won‘t call anyway. No one will ever call me again.
I couldn‘t draw the bodies while the heads talked over me, and the mosaic formed in blood, and what is a sketch but a chalk outline done in pencil or words? And what is a black network narrative but the story of one degree of separation, of sketching the same pain over and over, wading through so much flesh trying to draw new conclusions, knowing that wishing would not make them so?
She once told a boyfriend about these considerations and he said, “You are completely out of your mind.” She told a new friend at work and she said, “Honey, you‘re not crazy. You‘re a woman.”
It was that kind of mindfuck: to be too visible and invisible at the same time, in the ways it mattered the most.
•
One week later, tucked into a double bed sheathed with red flannel, Deming Guo awoke with the crumbs of dialect on his tongue, smudges and smears of dissolving syllables, nouns and verbs washed out to sea. One language had outseeped another...He‘d bled English vowels and watched his mother‘s face fall.
She needs me more than I need untainted hands.
•
‘The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.‘
Among the many ways to combat nothingness, one of the best ways is to take photographs.
The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell.
You may not run away from the thing that you are because it comes and comes and comes as sure as you breathe.
These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.
I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled her off to a sanatorium. I don‘t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly they take you away from the known world for wanting it?
•
I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.
pickThis is the best way I can sum up 2018. 30 books, 9,239 pages. Over the past year I got back to reading, something I hadn‘t been able to do for more than a year & a half. Thankful beyond words for the patience & perseverance of the people who saw me through & continue to encourage me to places better & beyond where I have been. Here‘s to 2019, big changes & more books. 📚
