Lot

by Bryan Washington

We watched them bloom like an opera, a telenovela, the sunrise.

She’d never tell us what it was like, but scandal transcends languages, cultures, generations.

He was, despite everything, still one of us.

Wore his skin like a sunburnt peach.

But mostly we had silence. The kind that seals your ears.

Which she called another reason to welcome Gloria (the beloved) home—as a woman who’d been through It, someone who appreciated a rough time.

Now that I’ve rolled around and had some lovers I can tell you a secret: the difference between people with the wildness in them, and people like us, is you usually can’t tell until it’s past too late. It’s just too much a hidden part of them. Days and months and years’ll pass before a person reveals themselves—and then all of a sudden they’ve fucked the postman, or left the gas on, or stuck their hands in your child’s pants.

She read beautifully, deeply.

Eventually, I finally asked her what she got out of reading these books by old dead men, what the words on the page had to do with her. The kind of question an idiot asks. But she took it seriously, she pursed her lips. It’s just another way to talk to the dead, she said. It’s another way to make a way, she said.

That these things could keep happening and life could keep going was more mysterious to me than whatever the fuck he was showing me.

But then I was born, and he stepped out for a glass of water, and believe it or not he’s been thirsty ever since.

Ma pokes her head in when there’s time—the one thing we have too much of—just to ask me if I’ve got it. If everything’s under control. And the answer’s always, always no. But of course you can’t say that.

Change anything too much, it gets harder to keep it alive.

My mother’s the only girl in the world who smiles as sad as she does.

It didn’t take long to see that there’s the world you live in, and then there are the constellations around it, and you’ll never know you’re missing them if you don’t even know to look up.

Ma’s daughter had left her. Her son had left her. Her husband had left her. So I couldn’t leave her. Not that it’s worth feeling sorry for. It’s honestly not even sad.

She said if we remembered nothing else she taught us, to know that love was a verb.

It is an active thing, she said. Something you have to do.

Desire don’t discriminate, said Avery. Desire’s gonna swallow every motherfucker out here.

It baffled Raúl that the people who bought from him left their homes, left their couches and their kids and their fridges and their televisions. To come out here. These stinking, fucking streets. The filthy heft of Texas Avenue and the sewage clogged on Fannin and the twilight at the end of every godforsaken intersection.

It’s hubris, said Avery, one day, apropos of nothing.

he said my name, my actual name, and I didn’t have the words for that.

This is how easy it is to walk out of a life. I’d always wondered, and now I knew.

It took me a while to figure out that we’re only who we allow ourselves to be.

The thing about slow learners is that they eventually do learn.

On the contrary, he said, we made our own world indoors. Our house had districts, villages. They had histories and legends.

He saw the candles by the stairs and the lighters on the counter and the boxes in the kitchen and the cans lining the tile, and when he asked if I was coming or going I said this was just how some people lived.

It all feels impossible to me, this shit no one I know could afford, but Ma called it cyclical. She said you have things and then you don’t.

He told me I was lucky, I was living in a piece of history, and I said if I was so fucking blessed he should’ve grown up here himself.

If you couldn’t afford to leave, and you couldn’t afford to fix your life, then what you had to do was watch the neighborhood grow further away from you.

You tell yourself why it is that you’re staying, said Ma. When you figure it out, you keep it to yourself. Ma looks straight at me. It’s the most honest face I’ve ever seen anyone make. A little like she already feels sorry for me. Like she already knows something I don’t. But it’s a reason you’ll have to live with, she says. Even if it’s nothing. And that is something you’ll have to live with, too.

You go somewhere else and stay there and then go back home, he says. Then you tell me how they’re feeling.

I know that even if we don’t always do the things that need to be done, we do the things that we need to.

You bring yourself wherever you go. You are the one thing you can never run out on.