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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.

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.

Mother is God and our house, our strange house, is the Garden, big and teeming with things that

I’ve been tasked with naming but cannot. There are words for walls and tiles and banisters but not words for what it means when walls, tiles, and banisters savor the taste of your collapse.

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. There’s the sobbing woman who pulls herself together for her husband, her children. She sinks like an anvil into the part, until she is the part. The other hers disappear, phased-out software.

I tell her no, but she knows better. I wonder which of my lies she’ll remember, which she’ll cry about to her therapist, a decade or two from now.

Mama always said that to us growing up. Once, I replied, Mama, did the ancestors really dream of me? Didn’t they have dreams for their own lives? Mama looked at me like I was dumb, said: Their dreams for themselves were their dreams for you, because we’re all connected.

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.

Was it me all along, deluded

and deranged, who made her something sinister? Is it me who haunts, me who is the ghost? This, I’ve never denied. A kid as fucked up as I was could make no claim to blamelessness. People saw me and smelled the malformity. Saw through to the very bad girl.

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

It doesn’t feel right to say 677 is haunted—I can’t bring myself to believe in such things, to forgo all reason—but yes, of course it’s violent. Its hate for us is so personal, we sometimes weren’t sure we hadn’t wronged it and just forgot about what we’d done. That this is its revenge. Only a serious violation on our part could explain this level of calculated fury.

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.

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.

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.

“Basically. No animal products at all. In addition to excluding meat, you don’t eat anything that comes from ani mals or specifically that requires the exploitation of animals,” says Elijah. “That makes sense,” says Eden, and I see Eve inhaling a breath so as not to comment. She wants to say, No, it actually doesn’t make sense. That individual abstinence from animal products does everything to ease one’s own sense of moral responsibility but does nothing to challenge the system. It eases guilt, not animal suffering. An argument would ensue between everyone here if she were to speak. Eve, an excellent articulator and quick processor, a superior logician, would dominate.

At the end of it all, everyone would be left feeling small, even Eve herself, except for that brief moment when she felt big.

I see her take opposite action. She is angry, angry at Elijah for being vegan, which she thinks is stupid, and angry at Eden for seeing any good sense in it. Angry that everyone does not have the correct opinion. But she has checked the facts swiftly in her mind, knows that the degree of anger is not justified. There is no great injustice here. Just two people exploring and finding out how to exist in a world in which we are all automatically collaborators in global suffering. And so, given the urge she feels in relation to that anger—to lash out, to humiliate with the power of her words—she does the exact opposite.

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.

But girls are animals, I counter. You can’t be half girl half animal because a girl is already full animal.

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.

We bend and bend until we mold ourselves as closely as we can into their images. Mother is God.

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.

What is she thinking right now? A death in the family is torture for the control freak.

Eve and I understand, though, that at its heart, a house is no more than what is inside of it, and what protects it, and who’s built it, and who lives in it or has lived in it. We all had our part. Mama had her part.

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 I hold back, the way Mama never could.

“I’m not gone,” I say. “I’m here.” Where else could I be? I want to show her my body. Take off my top and my trousers. Get naked. I am here and it hurts. I am fighting with all I have to be here.

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?

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. And what is there between memory and forgetting? Today?

what is a person if not their body, no matter how many selves they hold?—but

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.

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

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.

Maybe there is no saving, only salvaging. Maybe every breath is the triumph, and we must learn to take the win.