They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Regardless of how wide your wings stretch, they were still born from a single place.

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.

The machinery of a mundane week that wears one down until it becomes normal. The sharpness of an alarm rupturing the silence of sleep. The bagged lunch and forced joy with co-workers who are not-quite-friends.

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.

We often see black people, more than any other demographic, restricted to what versions of themselves can be briefly loved and then discarded.

It’s a question of who can afford the show, which in the case of ScHoolboy Q, becomes a question of who can afford to be comfortable saying a word that comes with a violence they’ll never know.

I wonder what it must be like to trust a stranger with your undoing in the way that The Weeknd asks us to. What it must be like to feel briefly full without considering if any emptiness might follow.

Stepping out into the night, swallowed by grey even inside of the black, I’m not sure if I came here tonight to forget pain, or to remember thirst.

In the ’70s, the answer was perhaps easier to digest. That punk rock, born in part out of a need for white escape, just wasn’t prepared to consider a revolution that involved color, or involved women as anything that the scene deemed useful. That, of course, also being a reflection of the time.

I don’t know how to be honest enough to say that there isn’t a place for kids like us, so we need to make our own, and nothing is more punk rock than that. Nothing is more punk rock than surviving in a hungry sea of white noise.

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

In the place of explicit bursts of violent fantasies, the album instead opts for a low and consistent hum of violences, the ones that seem more logical to someone who might also be sad, who might also want to turn their loneliness into a weapon without having it actually look like a weapon.

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.

A therapist tells me to challenge my “inner cynic,” but when I do, I simply find another inner cynic behind that one. I am, it turns out, a nesting doll of cynics.

I imagine my fondest memories gathering me in their palms and taking me to a place where I can join a discussion already in progress with all my pals in a room with an endless jukebox.

I imagine death similarly. As stepping tentatively down the carpeted stairs of my childhood home, following the sound of warm voices and soft incandescent light. "Come downstairs and say hello"

there are times when destruction is not as much of a choice as we think it is

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.

racking up just enough sins to make praying worth the time

It is easy to be black and non-confrontational if nothing is on fire, and so it has never been easy to be black and non-confrontational.