They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

“This, too, is a response to grief,” he tells us. “Covering yourself in the spoils of your survival.”

or say God and mean whatever has kept you alive when so many other things have failed to.

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.

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. There is optimism in that, too, in knowing that more happiness is possible.

But, then again, there is a time to throw all else aside and see if maybe dancing will bring us back to life, packed so tightly in a room of strangers that everyone becomes one whole body, shaking free whatever is holding it down.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.

Sometimes, when you know so much of not having, it is easy to imagine those who do have as exceptionally worry-free.

I’m less in favor of anything that hurts and then becomes theater, if that theater isn’t also working to heal the person experiencing pain.

All things do not pass. 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.

Life is too long, despite the cliché. Too long, and sometimes too painful. But I imagine I have made it too far. I imagine, somewhere around some corner, the best part is still coming.

my grief isn’t special beyond the fact that it’s mine, that I know the inner workings of it more than I know yours.

it is the kind of town that will hold you under its tongue until it is ready to swallow you whole

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.

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.

No one decides when the people we love are actually gone. May we all be buried on our own terms.

If I have the destruction of something that I once loved to carry with me at all times, isn’t it like I still have a companion?

There are the politics of chosen struggle. What it is to not go home, when going home might be a more comfortable option.

I am interested in what we afford each other, in terms of the emotions that can sit on our skin, depending on what that skin might look like.

It made me reconsider the true purpose of a funeral. To see it, instead, as something that makes death memorable for those still living, something less fearful to sit in.

Still, it was mine, and growing up without a lot of money makes you cherish what is yours.

If you are from any place in this America where you have seen all breeds of struggle grow until they cloak an entire community, and you are fortunate enough to survive, few things become more urgent and necessary than reminding the world when you’re at your best. Because you know how fleeting those moments can be. You’ve seen how quickly they can vanish.

Witnessing the taking of sacred things is how we learn to covet.

It is almost unfathomable to tell someone to act like they’ve been somewhere before when they are intensely aware of the fact that they were never supposed to be there in the first place, isn’t it?

When you love a place, coming to terms with its lesser qualities and learning to apologize for them is commonplace.

And everyone is jumping and pointing at the house on fire without considering there are people inside.

It is hard to build a myth so large without eventually becoming part of it.

Additionally, when black people singing songs about guns and drugs make it to number one in a country where black people are arrested and killed for guns or drugs or less than that, it can feel a bit like life as spectacle is more protected than life as a fully lived experience.

There are few sins greater than the ones we commit against ourselves in the name of others. The things that push us further away from who we are, and closer to the image people demand.

What we didn’t understand was a way to express what we understood and walk away unscathed.

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.

It was very out of character for me, but I was rebelling against the feeling of anything but grief. When you allow something to grow a shadow at your back, anything that distracts you from it is going to need severing. I think, perhaps, that the key is never letting the sadness grow too large.

It walks a line between punishment and survival, like so many tools of escape do.

It is easy to think of anything that makes you feel better as medication, even if it only makes you feel better briefly, or even if it will make you feel worse in the long run.

How do we explain to a child that children have been buried and we were sad but could not let go of our principles and our history and the violence that is born and reborn from it—that we clung to our guns, those small deadly gods, more tightly than to our neighbors?

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.

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.

We are not done burying our heroes before we are asked to bury our friends.