They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

It is one thing to be good at what you do, and it is another thing to be good and bold enough to have fun while doing it.

When you watch hope closely enough, manifested in enough people, you can start to feel it too.

The truth is, if we don’t write our own stories, there is someone else waiting to do it for us. And those people, waiting with their pens, often don’t look like we do and don’t have our best interests in mind.

What a gift, to be both invisible and as bright as the sun itself.

The shared machinery of love and trust has many parts and therefore many flaws, and therefore many opportunities for disaster.

there are people we need so much that we can’t imagine turning away from them. People we’ve built entire homes inside of ourselves for, that cannot stand empty. People we still find a way to make magic with, even when the lights flicker, and the love runs entirely out.

The real grief is silence in a place where there was once noise.

Still, they were taught to run toward guns for survival, and I was taught to run from them, or even the illusion of them.

Their question is often posed as How will I explain this person in the bathroom to my child? or How will I explain those two people kissing to my child? but rarely How will I explain to my child that people die and we do nothing? How do we explain to a child that children have been buried and we were sad but could not let go of our principles and our history and the violence that is born and reborn from it—that we clung to our guns, those small deadly gods, more tightly than to our neighbors?