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.

My parents would never buy snacks, because they were too practical and too busy for anything more than three meals per day.

This was the paradox: How would I ever heal from losing the person who healed me? The question was so enormous that I could see only my entire life, everything I know, filling it.

Before, the guiding instinct of our family was strongly intuitive, compassionate, and nurturing. In a word, maternal. My father and I both became orphans, malnourished, emotionally distant, neglected. Often, when we were sitting in the kitchen eating our takeout dinners, each of us at our separate spots—me on my laptop at the island, my father paging through a magazine at the table—we seemed barely recognizable to me. I looked at us and thought, whose family is this?

Almost impossible to reconcile if you believe that motherhood and brutality are diametrically opposed. The truth is that motherhood is stained with blood, tainted with suffering and the potential for tragedy. Why are we surprised when a mother—a real mother, someone who takes care of her children and loves them—commits atrocious crimes?

When you have chronic pain, the feeling that most people experience only in peaks becomes your baseline. Its effects are similar to those of the drugs that are often used to treat it. It is mood altering, causing changes in personality and even hallucinations. Pain can be a disease in itself.

This always occurs, no matter how reckless the people involved. I fall in love carefully. We winnow one person out of all those we meet and deem sexually attractive and worth several hours of our time. We get to know each other. We decide, against all better judgment, to take on the risk and pair with this person. We like someone. They like us; we stay together, we fuck our brains out, like turns to love. We ignore all the little nuisances of their personalities. Then trouble intrudes. For some, the relationship flares into violence. Some simply fade out and stop calling; they fall into someone else’s bed. You splinter and you split. We want to be together. We want to stay. This is our default setting.