Parachutes Book Three: The Impact

by Takerra Allen

I say a prayer that we will join in the afterlife, so desperately, I’d forfeit heaven if it meant I’d burn with you in Hades.

“Baby love. Love doesn’t protect you from those things. Love only heals from the damage. Love ensures you don’t go to battle alone. But with great love comes notable risk. With the fall. With the glide. Comes the impact.”

Then I prepare. I brace for what’s to come. Succumb to my destiny. I accept the memory. Because in the end, I would have rather gone up on that parachute with you than remained on the ground with anyone else.

“It kills me to see you broken. But I want you to love me enough to let me go, baby.” Vin looked like he had stopped breathing. “I want off the parachute.”

I make fucked up decisions and these are my consequences. That’s what I teach my kids.” “Because that’s what we were taught, Dalvin. Especially in the black community. We are so damn hard on ourselves. You should know better is instilled in us. We’ve been whooping our kids like Massa whooped us for moving to slow, or talking too loudly, or spilling a drink for hundreds of years. Now we’re breaking cycles. Having conversations. Figuring out the why. Reasons are not excuses, Dalvin. They’re reasons. There’s always a reason.”

Time can be an illusion, a healer, or a thief. It can pause pain, giving the false assumption that the pain passed. It can steal beauty, and hopes, and memories. Place expectations on our goals, and dreams, and relationships. Time can make you believe that because enough of it has passed, things that were, are no longer…

Turning around and calling black women masculine when they’re actually the biggest nurturers. But we’ve rewired them. Why you think other races had black women raising their babies? How anybody from any race will never forget a love from a black woman if they had the privilege to receive it. They protect you. Genuinely love you with no expectations.

To deem someone flawed suggests that you believe they have deviated from perfection. But there is no perfection. People are people.