They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

If you believe, as I do, that a blessing is a brief breath to take in that doesn’t taste of whatever is holding you under;

say God and mean whatever has kept you alive when so many other things have failed to.

The soundtrack to grief isn’t always as dark as the grief itself. Sometimes what we need is something to make the grief seem small, even when you know it’s a lie.

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

But when all else fails, you have to be able to go home again and have people call your name in a way that is familiar to only them.

If this year was bad, next year might be even worse, or at the very least it might be harder. We are nothing without our quick and simple blessings, without those willing to drag optimism by its neck to the gates of grief and ask to be let in, an entire choir of voices singing at their back.

There was no notable reason for this trip. I’m not sure what I wanted to feel, other than closer to a sadness and rage that had become a very real part of my life.

Staring down the life you have left and claiming it as your own, living it to the best of your ability before the clock runs out.

He gives himself over to the fact that what he has will do, until he has nothing else.

There are moments when those we believe to be immortal show us why that belief exists.

If, for example, a word can be hurled through the air while a boot comes down on a face, that part of the word’s lineage has to be accounted for. Any language that is a potential precursor to bloodletting has a small history that it can’t be pulled apart from.

It is one thing to watch a people take a weapon out of your hands, but it is another to fashion it into something else entirely, something that doesn’t resemble a weapon at all.

The Four Ls: Longing, Love, Loss, Loneliness.

young enough to imagine a world in which he is invincible, so his interest in nihilism doesn’t feel like it’s directly trimming any years off of his life.

I don’t remember the first time that I made an excuse for being a silent witness.

It is a luxury to romanticize blood, especially your own. It is a luxury to be able to fetishize violence, especially the violence that you inflict upon others. To use it as a bond, or to call it church, or to build an identity around it while knowing that everyone you can send home bloody will not come back for revenge.

There is no war, but for the one that is claiming actual casualties. It is outside. And the bodies all look the same. There is no option now but to be honest about that.

Another example of how expendable the black body can be when in the way of needs that are greater than it, the range of those needs changing by the hour, or second.

But it was a reminder that choosing invisibility means giving yourself over to what so many systems in this country already deem you.

Nothing is more punk rock than surviving in a hungry sea of white noise.

“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. / America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. / I can’t stand my own mind. / America when will we end the human war?”

The first time I lost a friend, a true friend, to the unfamiliar violence of a bottle of pills, I wondered what it must be like to not feel like you were destined for death, but still want to arrive at it.

I’m sad and I’ve hurt people and I’m a beautifully tortured survivor of my past is a hard thing to say out loud (or scream on a chorus), but it is the honest thing, which means it is the thing that I would rather have sitting in the room with me on the days I miss everyone.

It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.

Returning to the balm for an old wound, ashamed that I once decided to wear it.

What I really want to do is say that life is impossible, and the lie we tell ourselves is that it is too short. Life, if anything, is too long. We accumulate too much along the way. Too many heartbreaks, too many funerals, too many physical setbacks. It’s a miracle any of us survive at all.

There will always be something great and tragic to celebrate and I am wondering, now, if I’ve had enough.

But our best work is the work of ourselves, our bodies and the people who want us to keep pushing, even if the days are long and miserable and even if there are moments when the wrong side of the bridge beckons you close. All things do not pass. Sometimes, that which does not kill you sits heavy over you until all of the things that did not kill you turn into a single counterforce that might.

I am sad yesterday, and I might be sad tomorrow, and even the day after. But I will be here, looking for a way out, every time.

But the way I think about grief is that it is the great tug-of-war, and sometimes the flag is on the side you don’t want it to be on. And sometimes, the game has exhausted all of its joy, and all that’s left is you on your knees. But, today, even though I am sad, my hands are still on the rope. I am making my best work when my hands are on the rope, even if I’m not pulling back.

Life is too long, despite the cliché. Too long, and sometimes too painful. But I imagine I have made it too far. I imagine, somewhere around som...

All emotion, when performed genuinely and facing an audience, can be currency. Sadness and fear are, perhaps, the two biggest bills in the billfold,

There is no evidence to suggest that humans are going to become any more kind this year, or more empathetic, or more loving toward each other. If anything, with our constant exposure to all of one another’s most intense moments, the bar for what we seem prepared to tolerate gets lower with every second we spend screaming into each other’s open windows.

What good is endless hope in a country that never runs out of ways to drain you of it? What does it mean to claim that a president is not your own as he pushes the lives of those you love closer to the brink?

We are all going to die. That’s true, though I hope I get a few more trips on this sometimes wretched ride. I have tasted enough of its highs to know that they’re worth sticking around for, though not worth worshiping as a sole survival tool in the face of its lows.

I had moments where I thought life was done with me and I thought myself done with it. And, perhaps like some of you, I have remained here because of my comfort with the darkness I know and my fear of the darkness I do not.

The great thing about an afterlife is that we’ve always been able to imagine it as the best possible place for us and our needs.

That which does not kill you may certainly kill someone else.

“I remember in the kitchen when you told me your grandma died. That’s when I realized it gets worse” & it does, oh it does & it is really something to really remember that you can actually be alone

What Marvin Gaye knew, even as a man of God, was that Heaven might not be open for him, or for any of us. He knew then what so many of us know now: we have to dance, and fight, and make love, and fight, and live, and fight, all with the same ferocity. There are no half measures to be had.

Turning off the news and watching two hours of a mindless action film can be rebellion. But without being coupled with any actual HARD rebellion, without reaching our hands into revolutionary action, all you’ve done is had a pretty fun day of joy, sex, and a movie.

know what it is to feel that urge to build a small heaven, or many small heavens. Ones that you cannot take with you, but ones that cannot be taken from you.

It’s easy to convince people that you are really okay if they don’t have to actually hear what rattles you in the private silence of your own making.

Public performance as a way to hold yourself together until you could fall into what actually kept you alive in your secluded moments.

No matter how obsessed you’ve been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who still wants you whole.

When I started making my own money, I bought all of the sneakers I saw rappers wearing in their videos because it seemed like a way to separate myself from the times I opened an empty refrigerator.

The only way to build yourself into something unstoppable is to become intimate with all of that which would otherwise attempt to stop you where you stand. Hunger

“No one is going to determine my destiny in this sport but me. So, pal, either bury me, or do nothing at all.”

history repeating itself wouldn’t be so bad if not for the chorus of violences accumulating along the landscapes where small miracles sometimes took place

it’s a shame to still have living hands & barely anything left worthy of touch.