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by Rivers Solomon

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.

She’s responsible, sensible. Sometimes I think this is enough to make her turn out okay. The kids who grow up fine do so because of us, or despite us.

That’s what I see when I look at my baby sister. It takes a few millimeters of digging beneath the surface to find she’s an emotional clusterfuck, but she’s functioning—something I’ve only ever aspired to. That’s my dream for Elijah.

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.

People like me, people who are nothing, people who are empty shells, balloons—any old thing can carry us away. It takes a forceful hand to pull us back to earth.

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

Even when you fight with everything you have to escape the house, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because outside the house is just as bad as inside the house.

sound like I’m three years old. Sometimes, I am three years old. I can’t tolerate a single emotion. Every upset is a disaster. Every inconvenience proof of my nothingness when I don’t have a mother to grab onto to give me shape. And now, I have no mother, will never have a mother again.

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

We have, to some degree, broken the cycle of endless pain. Haven’t we? Mama and Pop had been beaten raw with switches and extension cords, wooden spoons, belts (buckle side); been called useless, ugly, good for nothing; been shouted at till kingdom come. Beyond the occasional few hard slaps and spankings, my sisters and I had not been victims of such violence from our parents. Mama and Pop had escaped that life and were desperate for something different for their kids. But it lived in them still, that past, the way these things do.

parents atone for their personal lacks by punishing their offspring.

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 enough water on her cheeks, in the space of seconds, to save a dying man from thirst.

We have a tendency at times to exonerate fathers, seemingly blameless because of their absence or their ambivalence.

I am left with a man who was pleasant, but who I cannot say that I know, and a man who I remember fondly, but also remember not at all.

I’d like to tell her that no family is innocent, not really, that behind every family is a story of harm, that the family itself is a capitalist institution whose definitions and frameworks are imbricated with patriarchy, childism, abuse—but I know it’s not what she means and

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.

Sometimes, we want only to tell our story and have someone listen. We must know that on this earth, what happens to us matters; otherwise, what tethers us to the living?

The realization that validation of the pain will never come from those who inflicted the pain has the power to obliterate. Did it happen? If they’re not apologizing, if they’re not admitting they’ve done

it, did they do it? What is real? What is true? Is my life a fantasy? Then let me wake up by dying.

There are no mansions without a torn-down forest.

If I cannot forget, what is there? I am always remembering, even when I am not. Me is in itself a remembrance. Me does not exist without the past that shaped my being.

Healing, in its most traditional sense, describes the post-trauma process of a physical wound. How can it apply to something so dynamic as a whole life? A whole person? A brain? Can you look at a group of people and tell who among them is “healed” and who is “wounded”?

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

She wants to be loved so fully and completely that her heart explodes from the pleasure of it, but knows that she never will. Elijah isn’t the sort of girl people fall in love with.

how sometimes I am bright and sweet, and other times wild and angry, and other times an old, toothless witch-woman who speaks in wise riddles.

Though I am functionally an atheist, it still baffles, the way the world has plans for us so out of line with what we could have ever predicted. And it brings no relief to acknowledge that that is because there is no plan. 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.

The rage is too comforting to dismiss. It massages my shoulders, rubs my feet, wraps me in blankets, and makes me chicken soup. It is telling me, Sweet dear, poor you.

“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?

“It’s not unusual for trauma victims to assume that they’re the problem, that the common denominator in all of their suffering is themselves, because, hey, they’re the ones consistently being shat upon.

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.

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?

Oh, world, which slips, and slips, and slips away from us. Life is a soaped-up baby, slick with suds and Johnson & Johnson baby oil. Oh, sweet child, there goes your infant head, cracking against the porcelain of the tub. There goes the water slithering down your throat and into your lungs.