They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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

That maybe, what we see when we close our eyes is better than anything the living world could offer us in our waking hours.

It occurs to me that for some, emotional distance is what it takes to equalize race.

I didn’t, in that moment, understand that what makes a gun real or fake in the imagination ransacked by fear isn’t always the color of it, or the shape of it. Sometimes, it is the body of the person holding it, or the direction that they choose to point it in. What my parents were trying to teach wasn’t a lesson about weapons, but a lesson of the body and the threats it carries. We all have a right to keep the people we love safe.

Love and joy alone will not rid America of its multilayered history of violence that has existed for longer than any of us have been alive. That violent culture, no matter the amount of prayers and grief we throw at it, remains unshakable.

It is rooted so firmly into the machinery of America that it has its hands around our decision-making processes, the language we use for endurance and survival. The violence is, in some ways, inescapable. It isn’t always done with a gun, and is sometimes done with a pen.

I know nothing except that this grief is a river carrying us to another new grief, and along the way, let us hold a space for a bad joke or a good memory. Something that will allow us to hold our breath under the water for a little bit longer.

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. When that world falls to pieces, maybe we can use whatever is left to build a better one for ourselves.