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by Rivers Solomon

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.

I’ll have an hour, two hours, sometimes even three, of cheery productivity, before this version of me, flighty and unrealized, leaves me again.

Emmanuelle sucks in a breath, pulling herself into shape, but I already see her seams strain against velvety rolls of adipose emotion.

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

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

And what of my father? Where is my ire for him? Okay, but like, what of anyone’s father. Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.

The words seethe under my tongue. Mama’s words and Pop’s. 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.

I see everyone inside of everyone. 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.

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.

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

My lips on the ground, I taste sand and salt, crunch it between my teeth, and swallow it. Mother is God, and I am as good as this earth in my mouth, this earth I came from. Mother is God, and I am the Garden of Eden, a paradise inhabited by lost creatures.