What We Lose

by Zinzi Clemmons

I am an anachronism, a sport, like the bee that was never meant to fly. Science said so. I am not supposed to exist.

I feel the pressure of my skin holding in my organs and blood vessels and fluids; the tickle of every hair that covers it.

They are middle- to upper-class coloureds—mixed race, not black.

My mother used this story as an illustration of how to be a good friend.

whom she could affect a West Philly accent to match the best of them.

My mother was the reliable center of their ad hoc community.

He was flown around the country to give talks and make inflated speeches about their research.

the enamel bowl, with water turned pink and hazy, that my grandmother used to wash his wounds.

security of my hometown in Pennsylvania was way past anything my South African family could imagine.

they would ask, where are the security fences?

hours driving around to find the brightest displays, in neighborhoods miles away from ours.

but there was social order of an old-world type and magnitude.

But I wasn’t any ruder than my school friends, who treated their parents as older companions or siblings.

treated with extreme dignity that, in my eyes, bordered on the comical.

my middle-aged aunts and uncles with grown children of their own referred to my grandfather as “Da” or “Daddy” instead of “you.”

my school friends called both her parents by their first names.

my mother would chuckle and shake her head, as if delighted at the thought that this girl actually existed.

phobias related to air travel, such as claustrophobia (a fear of enclosed spaces), acrophobia (a fear of heights), or agoraphobia

has to do with having a panic attack in a place you can’t escape from).

promising a meditation-based approach to aerophobia, lists an example of destination-associated flight anxiety.

preexisting flight anxiety, but the anticipation of the breakup compounds her symptoms.

relationship needs to end. Breaking up wouldn’t be right over the phone.

which turns out to be difficult but necessary, and notices that her anxiety is much less severe on the returning plane ride.

All of a sudden, the plane jumped into the air, as if an invisible hand had pushed us higher.

People screamed. Two people fell into the aisle. One lay there groaning; the other, a young woman of about twenty, screamed, “Mama, Mama!”

bright light flashed, and inside, the cabin was whitewash...

they began pressing the buttons for the flight attendants. “Close call,” I heard someone near me say with a sigh.

to tell us we had been hit by lightning.

but I was frozen in my seat, terrified.

They are what is called coloured in South Africa—mixed race—and my father is light-skinned black.

To call themselves something other than black was to take on the divisions of apartheid that grouped them according to skin tone and afforded them unequal privileges to keep them beholden to the state.

adulthood—I mentioned, as I often did (I fashioned myself as a politically engaged contrarian in my high school years), that I was the only black person at the party.

My life is played out like a jheri curl, I’m ready to die

But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe.

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.

there were rumors of tension because Aminah was black and Frank was not just white but a WASP,

She insisted, explicitly and implicitly, that straight hair was beautiful, and the kind she and I were born with—kinky, curly, that grew up and out instead of down—was ugly.

my scalp in ravages.

I imagined how easy sex would be with them, how natural and adult it would feel, as opposed to what felt like a struggle between my desire and better judgment with Jerome.

and I was a whole, acceptable human being to my mother.

Two students went so far as to question me outright, calling me an affirmative action baby.

I’m just a black girl to you, with Tough nails and Tough voice. I’m here.

“You know how many people told me that this week?” We stopped at a forked path on the college green. “I’m headed to the library. I’ll catch you later.”

philosophy student who played guitar with a band from the local art school on the weekends.

He gave me Sartre and Proust and the Velvet Underground and Bobby “Blue” Bland. He taught me how to blow smoke rings from his Marlboro Reds.

and I knew that I wasn’t yet, that I was still growing,

and it wasn’t long before he’d used me all up, grown bored, decided he needed more.

He just let his eyes flit over me like I was a piece of stone in the library wall or some other student he hadn’t known, like he hadn’t once breathed, I could love you, you know, on

My insides felt emptied out, and there was no need for food, no need for sleep.

He has red hair and he is not particularly broad or strong, like I had always imagined my one true love would be.