Model Home

by Rivers Solomon

After midnight, when Elijah still can’t sleep, I watch TV with her in her bed. True crime. Something grisly about a dead teenager or several. We both find solace in the inevitability of broken girls. Something to count on.

Mother forgot her own advice. She’d told me that white supremacy operates under a logic in which everything whiteness does can be rationalized as good, and everything Blackness does can be rationalized as preternaturally evil.

How cruel that our parents, unexorcisable, go on inside of us. How cruel that we cannot disimbricate their ghosts from our being.

Someone like me, more imagination than can fit into one body, you can die inside a fantasy of yourself.

I will say this of my mother: no amount of blood on my hands, animals in my closet, could have swayed her from the truth of my perfection.

Can the cellar that a kidnapper throws a child into be guilty or innocent? The lake that a killer drowns his women in? I’m not a person but a place where bad things happen.

Where does it fall short in your eyes? Or do you not even know? Are you simply desperate for my approval? An outside voice to tell you that you are good and worthy? Well, you are good and worthy. I will tell you that. But who am I? Why should I be your arbitrator? Am I God, Ezri? What does it matter what I think?

Mama knows she is being cruel, and I know that she knows that she’s being cruel, and she knows that I know, and she wants to stop, but she also wants to not stop because it feels too good to make her point.

I’m a coward, giving away information to a torturer for just a moment, a single moment, of peace. It’s stupid to run from pain instead of to it because pain always comes, and if I could just accept that, life would not be a constant fluctuation between numbness and fear.

Don’t think me small. If I am ever fragile, it is only because I prefer to be.

God, is that all life is, checking the facts, finding yourself wrong, then doing the opposite of what it’s your nature to do?

She said to me once that I wasn’t a real person. I was a paper doll. I wasn’t offended. I felt seen.

The only easy intimacy I’ve ever had in this life is with my sisters. Only when I’m touching them can I convince myself my hands are not blades.

All three of us live for being chased, desperate for some assurance that if we disappeared, someone might mourn our loss or reach into the walls and grab us if a ghost claimed us.

Fire loves itself. Wants to keep burning. I’m like that, too, most days, but I’m too emptied out for it now. Not enough fuel in me to sustain a tea light.

Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.

This city is a wasteland. What goodness there once was—in the earth and in the people who inhabited that earth—has been paved over with highways named after genocidists.

I take a breath and feel. Feel the million catastrophes inside me. Cascades of warm and cold, of tension, of nausea, of numbness. The whole house is a memory. I can’t distinguish between one tragedy that took place here and another.

My life is a dark woods with a slasher in the midst.

Emotions are little curses, spells. They come over us and take us away, outside ourselves. There is no predictability. At times, one spell trumps another, or multiple spells war at once, and the body becomes a shell in those moments, a shell that does not belong to you.

That’s the trouble of it all—this oscillation between identification and alienation, camaraderie and war. We are all the same. None of us are the same. People hurt us, and we hurt people, and it’s endless. It brings me to the floor, supplicant, devastated, ready to surrender to anything that might offer peace from the cliché reality that life is pain.

The world doesn’t make sense, so why should we, as inhabitants of that world, make sense?

Mother is God, I’m her baby Job. She has let a devil ruin me—and for no reason but to remind me, nothing in this world is ours.

Genocide is to humankind like water, air. There is no such thing as never again.

“I know from the outside it can look like we can all leave anywhere at any time, whether that be a bad job or an abusive relationship, but psychological cages are real cages, and we have to ask, who built that psychological cage?

She speaks my name softly, with something that I know is not love but has the feel of love to me. For a non-sliver, a hug is a blade, a razor, mother’s milk.

The distance from car to door stretches before me like a great pilgrimage. I should’ve packed snacks, a Bible, water, the hair of a lover in a locket, a letter to God. I’ve brought with me only fear.

I breathe. I breathe again. I breathe again. It’s a wonder to me that in the end, that is all there is—breath. With it, we live, and without it, we die.

Mother is God, and Mother is just a woman.

I can’t tell the difference between grief and ghosts. Both seize the body and take what they will.

At seven or eight years old, I thought only in feelings: terror, loneliness, desire. They were the heads of my Cerberus, my three-faced guard dog.

A child can’t know it wasn’t its fault it happened. Can’t know it is without blame, without fault. A child will drink bleach if you give it a cup of it.

I hate myself for wanting this to be true. It’s suicidal to crave nourishment from a fruit known only for its poison, but have I not come by this madness honestly?

I hate speaking of her in this way, in the way that I hate speaking of anyone, because whatever I might say will draw a picture, and the picture is wrong. There is no way to describe a person that is not a reduction.

I couldn’t save her. I can still save her. We will all save each other. Or maybe we won’t. Maybe there is no saving, only salvaging. Maybe every breath is the triumph, and we must learn to take the win.