What We Lose

by Zinzi Clemmons

My mother befriended people aggressively. She was extremely opinionated and often abrasive.

mother’s roots were deep and strong. Her relationships with others were resilient; she had friendships that persisted over decades, oceans, breakups. Her best friends were all former boyfriends. Most of her friends (and she had many) spoke of her offending them shortly after they met.

“But you’re not, like, a real black person,” a white girl named Anabel said to me, smiling, solicitation in her eyes. I felt ashamed, stunned. Uncomfortable, I said nothing, and after that day I never spoke to her again, indignant, but still unsure how to respond. That the tragic aspects of American blacks’ legacy are largely visible to the rest of the world is something I realized only later. I can quote our poverty rates, our mortality rates, black-on-black crime, and narrate the story of America’s prison system, which churns black men in and out like assembly-line products. My naïveté, my feeling of rejection, made my identification all the more strong.

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. “Snack” was a word that never entered their vocabulary.

When I was with him, a piece of me was in place, and I was a whole, acceptable human being to my mother.

Early on I felt I had nothing to offer Dean except my body. He was a full person and I knew that I wasn’t yet, that I was still growing, that he and our relationship were shunting me into being. I made myself available to him all the time, and it wasn’t long before he’d used me all up, grown bored, decided he needed more.

a job that has systematically robbed me of my idealism since the day I started.

With every day that goes by, every person who passes through our door, I banish further the possibility of anything ever truly changing for the better.

She has no family and no visitors; her life is a mystery that I fill in with tragedy.

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.

They wore smiles to which I had no concept of how to respond

they will become disoriented, as their dreams become merged with our world, and they prepare to live in the other world—the afterlife—forever.

The fearful, and those with unfinished business, will cling to life as long as possible, afraid to enter the next stage.

She marveled at the variety, as she did with most things available in America.

When I was a child, my mother would try to convince me of a woman’s need for a secret stash. “It can be anything: land, property, even a couple hundred dollars. You know, in case anything goes wrong and you have to get the hell out of there.”

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.

I made the choice to believe in my mother’s spirit. I chose to create a ghost, for the purpose of my own comfort.

Direct experience is the only way.

They screamed and beat her and she didn’t apologize, so they sent her to rehab in Botswana for a month. She came back wilder than ever, but better at hiding it.

“Aish,” my mother said into her trifle, “the worst times are when I wake up and I think, ‘I have to call Mama to say hello.’”

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

When Peter is gone, my body enters a period of slow motion from which I cannot emerge. Everything moves underwater. My body feels already extremely pregnant, as does my mind. There is little difference between week two and week eight.

I do not remember experiencing great grief so much as feeling cut adrift.

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.

But help never meant that the pain was gone, only that it was lessened.

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.

I won’t bow to the pressures of tradition and be traded between two men.

Out of all the people my age whom I know, one white friend has lost a parent. Out of Aminah’s friends, who are mostly black, four.

It’s like the man I married has been swallowed by another man who seems embarrassed by this fact.

said, I wear the fat; it doesn’t wear me.

Most people can handle only one truly difficult woman once in their life.

It comforts me to peace, and M to sleep, this harmony, the idea that for every suffering there is equal and opposite joy.