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by Rivers Solomon

Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.

Despite all the coddling denied me as a child, I never became the independent island of my mother’s dreams. I’m a baby bird, chirping for anyone at all to spit food into my mouth. If I make Elijah too many snacks, it’s because food-making is effortless compared to the real task of child-rearing: emotional presence. I don’t give my daughter too much because I have nothing to give.

The answer to all these questions, of course, is that human beings are not very good. I say this not misanthropically but with the realization that we, through apparent dominance over other animals, have crowned ourselves kings, when in reality we are ill equipped to handle the basic demands of life on this scale. We are forest creatures who’ve wandered into the man-made road, eyes frozen and wide.

Every day, everyone is a hundred different people: who they are when they are alone and feeling fuckable, who they are when they are alone and feeling unfuckable, who they are when they are grief wrecked, when they are joy smacked.

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.

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 could never know how Mama was going to react to anything, though. I hated tossing the coin. I preferred to keep secrets. If I didn’t show her who I was, she couldn’t disapprove.

Bodies are a portal to pools of knowing, if you can learn to read them, feel their experience, reconnect your spirit, your consciousness with your nervous system.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me. I can’t really live because I don’t let things die. Everything inside of me, it freezes. It’s natural. That’s what’s going on with my brain, these fractured bits of me freezing in moments of pain and death. My brain is kind of a dead thing.

History repeats and repeats because history is people, and we can reproduce only what we know, and we get what we know from our elders. The same mechanisms that facilitate language facilitate the passing on of pain.

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.

There is no understanding Mama, just like there is no understanding God. A yeshiva boy could spend years studying Talmud and never know her.

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.

I know what it’s like to be dead under someone’s invasive touch, frozen. Wouldn’t wish it on my kin. I have always been resistant to examination, to the eyes of others upon me, testing, assessing.

Anything anyone describes as a family matter, a private matter, rarely is. It is a phrase used to protect abuse.

I think often about what is possible and what is impossible. Consider the Holocaust, how it could be so, how such a sad, sad thing could be so—and yet, it is so. Genocide is to humankind like water, air. There is no such thing as never again.

Humans are gods, making worlds, then making miseries of those worlds.

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.