They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I’m not sure if I came here tonight to forget pain, or to remember thirst.

Who is going to be brave enough to ask where home is, and seek out something else if they don’t like the answer?

When the first song hit, I remember the smile on Nick’s face as he burst into our friend’s apartment with the CDs for the first time. How we all listened to every track three times over. How we told ourselves that we loved it. How it didn’t matter whether or not we did.

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.

No matter what comes out of a person in these times, the work that we make when we feel like we no longer want to be alive is not the best work if it is also not work that, little by little, is pushing us back toward perhaps staying, even if just for a moment.

There is plenty of rock optimism to counter this, of course, from Bruce Springsteen’s insistence on overcoming through labor to Tom Petty’s slick nostalgia as a survival tool. But when you grow up with punks, the kind of kids who listened to Richard Hell records and then found more like that, it’s easy to feel some distance from the kind of optimism that we’re taught to lean into during difficult times. Even now, I’m not as invested in things getting better as I am in things getting honest.

I wear a patch on my jacket now. I found it underneath a pile of records in Tyler’s apartment when his mom came to try and clean everything out but instead cried with me in a circle of his old t-shirts. It’s a patch that says “DESTROY WHAT DESTROYS YOU” in bold and sharp white letters. He got it for free at some NOFX show that we hated in 2003 because we took the girl working the merch table to score weed a few hours before the show and I imagine it was the least she could do.

The truth is, once you understand that there are people who do not want you to exist, that is a difficult card to remove from the table. There is no liberation, no undoing that knowledge. It is the unyielding door, the one that you simply cannot push back against any longer. For many, there are reminders of this every day, every hour. It makes “Alright,” the emotional bar and the song itself, the best there is. It makes existence itself a celebration.

I kissed my mother on a June night in 1997, and when I woke up, she was gone. That was it. I think sometimes it was better that way, to have our last moment be a routine farewell. Her throat simply closed in the middle of the night, a reaction to medication she was taking to fight against her bipolar disorder. Sometimes it isn’t what we’re battling that takes us, but simply the battle itself. Days before she died, she got to watch my brother, her oldest son, graduate from college. It seemed fitting, to go out on the heels of a celebration.