What We Lose

by Zinzi Clemmons

I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless. You may be able to pass in mainstream society, appearing acceptable to others, even desired. But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe. Even while you’re out in public, feeling fine and free, inside you cannot shake the feeling of rootlessness. Others may even envy you, but this masks the fact that at night, there is nowhere safe for you, no place to call your own.

What I knew for sure was that if I had been in Aminah’s shoes, I would have chosen the same thing, and I would have mourned the same way she did. And I would have wished, against the futility of such thoughts and acceptance of my decision, that it hadn’t happened, in the same way that I knew she did.

I thought about how every place on Earth contained its tragedies, love stories, people surviving and others falling, and for this reason, from far enough of a distance and under enough darkness, they were all essentially the same.

I question the implicit belief that only “mothers” with “children of their own” have a real stake in the future of humanity.

I realized that that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something, but reality resists it. Death is inert and heavy, and it has no relation to your heart’s desires.