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by Rivers Solomon

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.

Don’t think me small. If I am ever fragile, it is only because I prefer to be.

Okay, but like, what of anyone’s father. Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.

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.

A death in the family is torture for the control freak.

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 would’ve forgiven Mama everything had she said it, the only thing I ever longed to hear from her: I am sorry for the abundance of pain.