What We Lose

by Zinzi Clemmons

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. 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.

The pain was exponential. Because as much as I cried, she could not comfort me, and this fact only multiplied my pain.

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.

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.

I question the implicit belief that only “mothers” with “children of their own” have a real stake in the future of humanity.

Love and marriage are completely unrelated enterprises. Marriage bears as little resemblance to love as competing in the Olympics does to your afternoon jog.

I’ve amazed myself with how well I’ve learned to live around her absence. This void is my constant companion, no matter what I do. Nothing will fill it, and it will never go away.