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by Rivers Solomon

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.

Allow me to digress/regress. Allow me my smallness. Allow me an adolescent fury, expressible only via bad poetry. Gore. Skulls. Chains. Bones.

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.

Everyone believes in haunted houses. Ghosts are a function of the movement of time. Places become marked by the things that have happened to them, the things they’ve done. Rings in the trunk of a tree.

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.