They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

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.

And maybe this is what it’s like to live in these times: the happiness is fleeting, and so we search for more while the world burns around us.

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.

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.

Even in my decade-plus of loving Bruce Springsteen’s music, I have always known and accepted that the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal will come from.

What it is to find small pieces of a person who you know you’ll never get to wholly experience again. It feels, almost always, like piecing together a road map that places you directly in the middle of nowhere.

It is eight days in to this new and violent empire that is building upon a legacy of violent empires before it, and I have finally stopped trying to tell myself that everything is going to be all right. There is no retaliation like American retaliation, for it is long, drawn out, and willing to strike relentlessly, regardless of the damage it has done.

The major function of privilege is that it allows us who hold it in masses to sacrifice something for the greater good of pulling up someone else.

Joy, in these moments, is the sweetest meal that we keep chasing the perfect recipe for, among a world trying to gather all of the ingredients for itself. I need it to rest on my tongue especially when I am angry, especially when I am afraid, especially when nothing makes sense other than the fact that joy has been, and will always be, the thing that first pulls me from underneath the covers when nothing else will. It is the only part of me that I have to keep accessible at all times, because I never know what will come.

And I hope, then, that a child who blessedly knows less of the world’s evils decides to laugh with his friends in a place that reaches your ears. I hope it carries you back to the fight, as it has done for me. Joy, in this way, can be a weapon—that which carries us forward when we have been beaten back for days, or months, or years.