What We Lose

by Zinzi Clemmons

I want to write rage but all that comes is sadness. We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile.

I am not supposed to exist. I carry death around in my body like a condemnation. But I do live.

There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring i...

I chose to believe this story, of the athlete ruined by fame, instead of believing my worst thoughts and fears about my other home country.

Though American blacks were cool, South African blacks were ordinary, yet dangerous. It was something they didn’t want to be.

I only desired to belong, and I idealized this group as one does a storybook character or a superstar, or anything one doesn’t know firsthand yet loves like an old friend.

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.

I see you looking at me. I know how you see me.

He is interested in my background, in love with my skin, but not too in love. There is a casualness bred from familiarity that makes me at ease around him, that drew me to him in the first place.

Death and pleasure we experience asymptotically. We spend much time working upward on the slope, and most people only sometimes approach the lines of pure pleasure or death, close enough to touch. Maybe once or twice in a lifetime, for each.

I need an anchor so that I’m not living so close to death anymore. I need to believe in life again.

Unlike family or faith, her disease was something she had never chosen. When I came close to

telling her, I remembered that, and it rendered me silent.

I understood then, awash in unfiltered refrigerator light, that this was how I was going to cure my mom, with whole grains and elbow grease.

That was always the fear with men. I suppose

this was a part of the not talking, the not crying. I thought that if I didn’t acknowledge the horror we were living in, it somehow wouldn’t be as bad, and he would stay.

This was the paradox: How would I ever heal from losing the person who healed me?

The loss is what creates the condition. It’s not the fact of one parent, but that the loss has occurred. It’s the wound, not the parts that are left untouched.

We were all they had left of her.

This was all I had left of her.

I made the choice to believe in my mother’s spirit. I chose to create a

ghost, for the purpose of my own comfort. It made me happy to think that my mother still existed somewhere and that she could help us right after her passing.

My theory is that loneliness creates the feeling of haunting.

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.

I don’t know how to place this new mother, my dead mother, with the mother who was alive. When I look at

her grave, I feel it the most. How can she be there when she is still here, inside me?

Parts of her will live on in the trees and the streams and the birds of tomorrow. She is the water and the plants and the bits of dust I see swirl in columns of light. But she is dead.

that fatal mix of beautiful and visible brokenness

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.

The truth is that motherhood is stained with blood, tainted with suffering and the potential for tragedy.

I do not see the mother with her child as either more morally credible or more morally capable than any other woman. A child can be used as a symbolic credential, a sentimental object, a badge of self-righteousness. 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.

If I feel happy and shut my eyes, maybe it will be the same. But it will never be the same.

Qunu was all that I knew, and I loved it in the unconditional way that a child loves his first home.

I have yearned for certain sensations—the feeling of being able to contain someone’s hopes and fears in one touch.

He has that same thing that my father has—that only some men do—that extra bit of wiring that makes them stay.

Every time I touch him I think, how can something be this soft? It is impossible, this feeling of his newness against my coarse fingers. His every bone and skin cell is in a state of formation. He is coming into being before my eyes.

When Peter is gone, his absence feels familiar. Yes, there is that dark, terrifying loneliness that scares me, but I am acquainted with fear. If I stay inside it long enough, root my heels in deeper, it doesn’t feel scary anymore. It feels like home.

We are like bricks in a wall, and a new one cannot fit unless another is taken away.

the idea that for every suffering there is equal and opposite joy.

This is what it’s really like to lose. It is complete and irreversible.

How pernicious these little things called memories are. They barbed me once, but now that I no longer have many of them, I am devastated.

There could be love again; I can see the places where it might fit in my life. I may be ready to try.