What We Lose

by Zinzi Clemmons

One story my mother told often was when one of her best friends threatened to commit suicide after her boyfriend left her. She went to my mother for comfort, and my mother slapped her across the face, as hard as she could. Her friend’s face was bruised for a week. My mother used this story as an illustration of how to be a good friend.

But most of what I experience is secondhand, from my family and the news. Together, the stories and pictures constitute a vision of death and carnage that is overwhelming, incongruous to the plainspoken beauty of the country. I see no evidence of the horror, which is what makes it terrifying to me.

American news outlets made headlines out of his fascination with guns. He joked about arming himself when surprised by the sound of the washing machine. This does not shock me or strike me as out of the ordinary. All of my male family members own guns. My most hotheaded cousin sleeps with a loaded pistol under his pillow. (Miraculously, no fate similar to Oscar’s has befallen him.) I can understand the sense of fear—waking in the night, seeing your bedroom window open, the evening air breezing through the curtains.

My naïveté, my feeling of rejection, made my identification all the more strong. 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.

My mother’s views imbued my friendships with political importance—if I could maintain a relationship with a darker-skinned woman, I would prove her wrong. And so I pursued these relationships with fervor.

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.

asking not whether I am happy, but whether my mother would approve of him.

I repeated the Elijah Muhammad teaching my father had told me, that the ideal age for a woman should be one half the man’s age, plus seven years.

Woah lol

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.

A ghost is not a fact in itself; rather, it is a symbol for a need. The most important aspect of the ghost is the need that creates it. The cat-ghost is a symbol of the woman’s grief.

There is the logical conclusion: My family and friends experienced a string of positive coincidences at this particular time in our lives. Then there is the supernatural one, which we chose to believe—my mother, or the power of the universe in recognition

of her death, influenced a positive outcome in each of these events to better us.

Drained of energy

Loss is a straightforward equation: 2 − 1 = 1. A person is there, then she is not. But a loss is beyond numbers, as well as sadness, and depression, and guilt, and ecstasy, and hope, and nostalgia—all those emotions that experts tell us come along with death. Minus one person equals all of these, in unpredictable combinations. It is a sunny day that feels completely gray, and laughter in the midst of sadness. It is utter confusion. It makes no sense.