Model Home

by Rivers Solomon

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.

The world unfolds according to a logic most strange when you’re a child, and it wouldn’t do any good to try to parse

Another faction, less savory, roves my insides, too. Desperate husks, they run toward ghosts, not away, creeping from their crevices in the night for a chance to be with Nightmare Mother. If I could, I’d hang every one, snap their necks with rope. I have tried.

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.

My selves are ghosts, clinging to me with their unfinished business.

“You are beautiful, handsome, strange, ethereal, professorial, dark, an ocean. Rugged, dangerous.”

“You’re the ancestors’ greatest dreams realized.”

I am something no one wants to fall down.

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. These were her words when I came home crying a few days after Columbine, one of my classmates telling me that if he had a kill list, I’d be on it because I was Black. I said he sounded like he was in the Ku Klux Klan, which got me in trouble with our teacher for defaming the other kid’s character.

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

Surrounded by a house that is nothing but a house, I am embarrassed by my childish fear that mistakenly painted her into something violent. Was it me all along, deluded and deranged, who made her something sinister? Is it me who haunts, me who is the ghost?

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.

I am not even an I or a me. 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.

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

we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.

This city is a wasteland. What goodness there once was—in the earth and in the people who inhabited that earth—has been paved over with highways named after genocidists. White-owned Tex-Mex chains serving mediocre fajitas mark the graves of the dead.

our griefs are part of a long legacy of griefs. We are a people, and not alone.