They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

a blessing is a brief breath to take in that doesn’t taste of whatever is holding you under;

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.

Not enough people face the interior of separation in this way. 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.

The theme, in these albums and beyond, revolved around summoning “the girl,” and then wishing for ill to befall her as a punishment for heartbreak. Punishment rarely doled out by the man dreaming it up, but by some other circumstance: a car crash, choking on a meal, being attacked by an animal. It was, for me, very in the moment—something that I did myself in my teens from behind the security of a keyboard or behind a pen. It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.

So many of us begin tortured and end tortured, with only brief bursts of light in between, and I’d rather have average art and survival than miracles that come at the cost of someone’s life.

I have been thinking, then, about the value of optimism while cities burn,

Or, an acknowledgement of that which we all spend a lifetime searching for: the permission to come home again, after forgetting that there are still people who will show up to love you, no matter how long you’ve been away. No matter how obsessed you’ve been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who still wants you whole.

There is almost dying and then there is truly almost dying. The thing about that is you get a grasp of all that which you cannot take with you and then you sometimes wear it on your body at all times.