What We Lose

by Zinzi Clemmons

He would be a part of me, and we would come together and make another part.

mother told me that a man’s shoulders should be wider than yours, that he should be able to lift you easily. She didn’t like skinny men.

but whether my mother would approve of him.

No one in my family, going back to Africa in both directions, has ever run for any reason except self-preservation.

am doped out like the worst of the dope addicts.

heard my mother panting loudly and eventually screaming,

I lay there for the rest of the night, my heart pumping, exhilarated and unable to sleep.

Familiarity; and perhaps some satisfaction that my parents were, despite their coldness, in love.

fought to banish the thought of her while pitifully jerking myself off in my childhood bed.

She laughed at me. “So you’re finally getting it, huh?” she said, and walked away from me, cackling all the way down the hall.

asked to sit with him, tentatively. I was nervous that he would, for some reason, say no.

He smiled with one side of his mouth, and sat forward in his chair. I knew that I had him.

We climbed back into his car and he drove me back to the hotel, where I barely slept that night, restless in my empty room. The next day, I got on a plane back to the East Coast, exhausted.

finally

was the familiar sound of a body shifting on a bed, the floorboards complaining underneath. Then a faint, muffled sniffle.

Her collared shirt was unbuttoned and her stockinged feet poked out from under the covers.

an aching that came out of nowhere and spread to her spine. She had had difficulty getting out of bed the past few days.

called to the office at school on the day of the appointment,

even though it was the worst possible outcome, because it ended this horrible period of not knowing.

When we make love, it’s like we are two halves of a whole joining.

say yes to granola, rice milk, a young organic chicken, lemon, fresh rosemary, and baby potatoes.

She taught me that men don’t always need, but they love, a woman who can cook and keep house.

realize that, even if the chicken had been charred, or half-raw, I would never have known the difference from his face.

It’s official, real this time: I am in love.

“Ouma,” he says, calling me my nickname from childhood,

But that was one thing we never talked about: the apparent moneyed-ness of her treatment. It was something she knew her friends could never afford, and for that I think she felt guilty.

“He’s just like me,” she mused. “I’ll die too, it’s just that how I’ll go is more decided.”

“the dying process”—and they said the words like they should be followed by a ™.

As the person begins to sleep more hours of the day than they are awake, they will become disoriented, as their dreams become merged with our world, and they prepare to live in the other world—the afterlife—forever.

I realized that as much as I was holding on, she was too.

orphan was always a person without parents, without roots. I had one parent, and one was not none.

child deprived by death of one or usually both parents

the wound, not the parts that are left untouched.

my mom kept small amounts of cash socked away in separate accounts, some in tiny sums, others in fairly unbelievable numbers.

swore to myself that I would lock the money away, like she did when she saved it, and keep it safe. This was all I had left of her.

but because her mind is overwhelmed with grief for her lost companion, she imagines, convinced, that it is the spirit of the cat.

a cousin who had suffered as an undocumented immigrant for twelve years finally received approval for her green card.

Inside the box was a brand-new DSLR camera, still in the plastic. I called up Aminah and she came over right away to borrow

local boy pressed the shutter button of my mom’s camera.

dawdled and stalled, ordering coffee upon coffee so that I wouldn’t have to go home. I read the question on the baristas’ faces: Doesn’t she have somewhere else to be?

The thermostat found itself all the way up at 73, the temperature my mother liked, too hot for me or my father. The vents puttered from the heating pipes, and it sounded just like my mother’s breath.

graph resembled the form of an asymptote, the mathematical equivalent of ineffability:

This appears to be a paradox to beginners in geometry,

But this arises from their confounding the thing called a straight line in practice

which has neither breadth nor thickness, but only length.

The idea of a geometrical asymptote is therefore an effort of pure reason, and the possibility of it must be made manifest to the mind, not to the senses.

This powerlessness makes thinking deaf or blind to natural beauty.

thinking becomes impatient, despairing, disinterested in attaining the ends of freedom by means of nature.

however many images or metaphors you give him, you cannot describe to him the reality of those fruits.

The reality of the tangerine goes beyond ideas. Nirvana is the same; it is the reality that goes beyond ideas.