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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.