There There

by Tommy Orange

In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.

The Drome is my mom and why she drank, it’s the way history lands on a face, and all the ways I made it so far despite how it has fucked with me since the day I found it there on the TV, staring back at me like a fucking villain.

“Then tell that motherfucker I exist,” I said to her. “Tony, it ain’t simple like that,” she said. “Don’t call me simple. Don’t fucking call me simple. You fucking did this to me.”

He told me he never meant to become what he’d become, and I wasn’t sure what that was, a drunk, or a drug dealer, or both, or something else.

He’s always feared he’ll find out that he’s smelled like piss and shit his whole life without knowing it, that everyone’s been afraid to tell him, like Kevin Farley from the fifth grade who ended up killing himself the summer of their junior year in high school when he found out.

The men looked more tired and more drunk more often, and there were fewer and fewer women and children around.

We came to a red light. When it turned green, Jacquie reached down and took my hand. And when we got to the other side of the street, she didn’t let it go.

I hadn’t grown up fat. Not overweight. Not obese, or plus-size, or whatever you can call it now without sounding politically incorrect, or insensitive, or unscientific. But I always felt fat. Did that somehow mean I was destined to one day be fat, or did my obsession with being fat even when I wasn’t lead to me eventually being fat?

But is it a game? Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks they’re winning when they say “Get over it.”

If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.

But she got big to avoid shrinking. She’d chosen expansion over contraction. Opal is a stone. She’s big and strong but old now and full of aches.

I wanted to say something but couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say. It seemed both right and like the wrongest shit possible. I stayed quiet—the rest of the car ride and then for weeks after that. And she let me.

But then pretty soon I found myself saying sorry back. And we both said sorry back and forth until we started to cry and shake.

I kept on feeling white while being treated like any other brown person wherever I went.

There’s a secret war on women going on in the world. Secret even to us. Secret even though we know it,”

BEFORE YOU WERE BORN, you were a head and a tail in a milky pool—a swimmer. You were a race, a dying off, a breaking through, an arrival. Before you were born, you were an egg in your mom who was an egg in her mom. Before you were born, you were the nested Russian grandmother doll of possibility in your mom’s ovaries. You were two halves of a thousand different kinds of possibilities, a million heads or tails, flip-shine on a spun coin.