With the Fire on High

by Elizabeth Acevedo

“The best thing a father can do for his child is love the mother.”

It’s a strange thing to become a mom when the only example you ever had wasn’t even your own mother.

The world is a turntable that never stops spinning; as humans we merely choose the tracks we want to sit out and the ones that inspire us to dance.

Shit, that smile should come with a trigger warning.

As if my Puerto Rican side cancels out any Blackness, although if we go only according to skin, my Puerto Rican side is as Black as my Black American side.

I’m constantly having to give people geography and history lessons on how my grandmother’s hometown is 65 percent Afro–Puerto Rican, on how the majority of slaves were dropped off in the Caribbean and Latin America, on how just because our Black comes with bomba and mofongo doesn’t mean it isn’t valid. And it seems I’m always defending the parts of me that I’ve inherited from my mother:

This stuff is complicated. But it’s like I’m some long-division problem folks keep wanting to parcel into pieces, and they don’t hear me when I say: I don’t reduce, homies. The whole of me is Black. The whole of me is whole.

You can’t make too much space for a father like mine in your life. Because he’ll elbow his way in and stretch the corners wide, and when he leaves all you have is the oversized

And ain’t that what it means to be a sister? Holding things tight when the other one is falling apart?

We look beautiful and hood and excited to see the world, and none of us are hiding from this world seeing us.

And I know the past isn’t a mirror image of the future, but it’s a reflection of what can be; and when your first love breaks your heart, the shards of that can still draw blood for a long, long time.

Just the two of us. We can make it if we try.

because what better way to take a leap of faith than to set something on fire and trust it will not only come out right, but that it will be completely delicious?