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I’m busy noticing I’m alive. For the first time I’m aware that I’m the only one living inside my body, the only one who can feel, know. I’m alone but not scared. It feels nice being inside myself.
Naima and I only wear them on Sundays, when I beg God to erase my sins from His long mind. My last sin, still sweet on my tongue, probably earned a million marks on the chalkboard of all He knows.
“We praise the Lord on Sundays,” Daddy said, looking at me through the rearview mirror before backing out of the driveway. “We’d rather praise the Lord and go to heaven than work in the yard.” He put the Volvo in drive. If God is everywhere, then why can’t we praise God in our yard?
“A lot of good people go to hell. Only saved people go to heaven,” Mom adds. Saved. Confess with your mouth and believe in your heart. Believe.
Again, white lightning—a jagged slide from heaven to hell.
So many clouds that we couldn’t see the sky saying good night.
“Now you know good and well it’s too hot to be wasting air.” But I don’t waste air. I take it into my nose, down my throat, and into my chest, where sometimes I hold it in, pull it deeper into my belly, down below my belly button, let it swirl, rise, and rush out.
Get out and go—that’s all air wants to do. If it had a mom, she’d probably say, “You better sit your butt down somewhere.” But it has no mom to tell it what to do. So it plays free. Flies outside, catches all the sounds, mixes them up like rainbow flecks in a twirling baton,
Up high, a swarm of bugs fight over the fluorescent light. They think it’s the moon. Hungry for light, they think any light is the moon, but the moon is a thin-lipped smile.
Here comes the sun! Over the Gulf of Mexico, God always picks up pink and purple before bringing gold along. I like to think He does this just for me.
God seems closer over the Gulf of Mexico than He does in church. Like He’s the salt I taste on my lips.
I’m really not interested in creating rules for other people to follow. I have enough rules to follow on my own.
Inside me, there’s no space for fear. Everything is still brimming with bright lights, flowing, pulsing, bubbling, and dancing—unbound.
She felt an answer seeking her, but where? When? How? —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
That would be weird, and she doesn’t look weird.
I search myself. But all I find is fear, flapping its frantic wings inside me, all around me.
I try to imagine myself as the girl I’ve been carrying around in my mind.
I’m the girl on a pier over the ocean, long toes gripping planks, slowly letting go. She jumps, but I’m not ready. Maybe she wasn’t ready either because now she’s sinking.
Don’t know how they can be so nasty and still hear God so clearly.
I lie flat on my back in the grass, arms stretched out like Jesus. I do this so I can feel the overgrown blades against my skin—an itch I don’t scratch.
when I get too still, the motion-sensored light forgets I’m here. I move and it remembers. Move and it remembers. Move and it remembers until I’m tired of moving and I lie still—forgotten, forgetting.
I want to tell Gigi about the God I feel inside me when I get still.
You can stop. I was trying to let you feel the energy of your ancestors. That’s all,” Gigi says. I open my eyes, but I can’t turn around, can’t look at Mom’s face. “From heaven?” I ask, staring at the turquoise stars. “Wherever they are.” “From hell?” “Wherever they are.”
Gigi’s words come slow, as if she has to pluck each one from a part of her mind that has already traveled somewhere high in the sky. I wait for each word to fall on my ears like I wait for stray raindrops to fall on my skin on days with gray skies.
I picture the earth splitting underneath a steady turquoise sky.
She might be able to tell me the secret for thinking a different way without being afraid of going to hell.
I’m going to travel to places too far for them to see, miles and miles outside of being black, past the snap of their fingers with the complementary “Baby, boom,” “Baby, pop,” or “Baby, please,” past anything they say about me until I can feel them so far behind that I can look back and see stupid little girls, still occasionally talking their smack, pushing me on.
staring at the symbol for women, wondering why we’re the ones who have to make babies, why we’re the ones who have to deal with the blood, the stains, the shame.
But the truth has a strange way of following you, of coming up to you and making you listen to what it has to say. —Sandra Cisneros, “One Holy Night”
They’re everywhere, these stupid, ugly boys. Judging me. Making everywhere I walk feel like a runway. But I’m no model.
Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time. —Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman
I wanted to hang written words on the walls of my room. I wanted to find pieces of the world worth framing in gold.
Too bad you’re already that boy, who makes promises of love, but lies, lies, lies to get what he wants, and so easily convinces us we want the same thing. That boy who preys, makes us give, wish, hope, pray, then wait and wait and wait. That boy I hate.
“Sorry your fish got burnt,” I say. “Child, please. Burnt makes you pretty. Why you think I look so good?”
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free. —Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Alongside the verse, she scribbles a heart, and I regret not ever making such a mark in any of my books. Never again will I leave a margin empty beside a passage I love.
Fifty-fifty, fifty from him and fifty from me—that’s how love is supposed to be. Fifty apiece, like each of us putting two quarters in a piggy bank and keeping two in our pockets, Washington’s raised faces rubbing, his silver cheeks kissing. But Andre’s love is greedy, trying to take three of my quarters, leaving me with only twenty-five cents. No way. I need my fifty, my magic number: the number of steps I take from my room to the mailbox, where I look for application packets from my dream schools, the number of breaths I count in bed after I talk to God before my nightly walk through my
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She doesn’t like Andre. Says he walks with his arms away from his sides like they’re scared of his body, either that or his body is scared of his arms; whatever the case, she doesn’t know how I date someone so conflicted with themselves.
Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away. —Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
My secret fumbles about for a place to hide, but even in the dark, there is nowhere.
But lying in bed, with only blackness to stare at, the truth feels different inside me, like it’s a part of me, like I own it, and I change my mind. Telling the truth was worth it.
And the nerve to share a pickle with her! That was our thing. Is nothing we did sacred? Nothing we shared? You liar! You told me you loved me. You thief! You took everything I had to give.
listening. Explain again how to feel the energy of our ancestors in my hands so I can feel you, and your power can help pull the purple out of these bruises that have numbed me. Again and again, please say the words that will open me up, dissolve the dead parts, clear out space for gold notes to dance, shuffling their feet and flapping their elbows, and remind me how to love life.
Falling feels like an eternity. Falling feels wild and bright and fully alive.
the responsibility for my own life rattling around inside me like a pop-top lid inside an empty soda can. “You can’t control everything, Taja,” Daddy says in a soft voice, eyes closed to the sun. “I know, Daddy. But I can control a lot.” The rattling stops and responsibility sinks in.
Weighing wrongs along a path in the park, we let tall pines turn into shadowy strangers, blacker than the night.
I’ve tried so hard not to care after all the times he hurt me, but there were always parts of him still curled up in my corners.
Somehow his face looks different, ugly—an ugliness his apologies can never erase. I imagine his remorseful words passing right through me into the night air, still scented with rain and pine, then drifting off and getting lost somewhere in the woods.
He lowers his knees into the mud, his heavy head in my lap. I let him because I know he can taste my indifference, know it’s not sweet to him like it is to me. But I start to feel the heat of his face on my inner thighs through my jeans. No. I can’t allow myself to feel him cry. Oh, no. I can’t allow his tears to seep through my pores and find the places that can love him. So I stand up and walk off, leaving him on his knees in the mud.
“Don’t be jealous of sinners who flaunt their sins because they will spend eternity in hell while you’re in heaven.” “Hallelujah!”
