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.

Everyone, turn your eyes to the city you are told to imagine on the news and, instead, listen to the actual voices inside of it.

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.

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. And it is even another thing to then see the newly-fashioned once-weapon scattered into a lexicon that denies you immediate access.

I understand what it is to be sad, even when everyone around you is demanding your happiness—and what are we to do with all of that pressure other than search for a song that lets us be drained of it all?

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.

What good is endless hope in a country that never runs out of ways to drain you of it?