They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

This, more than anything, is about how there is sometimes only one single clear and clean surface on which to dance, and sometimes it only fits you and no one else.

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. It keeps us on that thin edge of annoyance and adulation.

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.

I believe in the magic of seeing a musician perform in the place they once called home.

I considered how often there is shame attached to loving anyone publicly. The shame, of course, comes on a sliding scale, depending on who you are and who you love.

Sadness, when you are truly being swallowed by it, can feel almost universal.

I don’t remember when my friends and I stopped asking the question of “why?” around death.

Columbus is like any other midsize-but-close-to-big city. It overflows with talented people who don’t always know where to place their talent, and sometimes there are far less talented people who just have access to a stage and enough people to watch them.

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

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.

And so what I’m saying is that our heroes spill from their heroes and their heroes before them, and at some point, everyone wants out.

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.

Public performance as a way to hold yourself together until you could fall into what actually kept you alive in your secluded moments.

No matter how obsessed you’ve been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who still wants you whole.

The boy on the playground who doesn’t really want to fight dances around and talks his shit at a volume that shakes the birds from the trees.

The only way to build yourself into something unstoppable is to become intimate with all of that which would otherwise attempt to stop you where you stand.

But, depending on pace, the things that can throw us off balance are often the small things.

Even as a boy, I had lived long enough to understand that the person we think shouldn’t die is the one who, of course, sometimes dies.

A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless.

I love the people where I’m from because they would fight to humanize me if I died violently on film.

I am used to the feeling of knowing the dead, having a touchable relationship with someone who is no longer present. Yet the immediate moments after the news arrives never get any easier to manage.

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.

Rumours is an album of continual, slow breaking.

And we are all here, we unlikely patriots. All of us pushed to the margins, trying to fight for ourselves and one another, all at once. Celebrating while still fighting, which is perhaps what represents the ethos of this country more than anything else.

Sometimes it isn’t what we’re battling that takes us, but simply the battle itself.

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.

I think about that expectation, to hold off injustice with one arm while still consistently offering forgiveness with the other.

There is pretty much no violence in this country that can be divorced from this country’s history.

The distance between curiosity and fear is tragically short. They are, like sleep and death, within the same family, a quick nudge pushing one directly into the other.

How we decide what “safety” is, how ours is only ours and must be gained at all costs.

It was a typical high school car, faulty and deeply loved.

These things are what our entire American history is littered with. Who will not make it home alive so that someone else can be fed.

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

Rap is the genre of music that least allows for its artists to comfortably revel in fiction, even though all of us know we are watching a performance.

The real grief is silence in a place where there was once noise.

It is hard to keep missing someone when there’s no way to tell how long you’ve been without them.

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.

Let the children have their world. Their miraculous, impossible world where nothing hurts long enough to stop time. Let them have it for as long as it will hold them.

I am a poet first and foremost, and second I am whatever comes after.