The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

“We grow anxious and restless without you, my child. One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing.

She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.

Because they tended to live so far apart, when they did gather en masse, it was an occasion of great celebration.

It was one of the few tangible things she’d touched of the past, a reminder that the History was not an imagining, not just stored electrical pulses. They were people who’d lived. Who’d breathed and wept and loved and lost.

That was all remembering was. Prodding them lest they try to move on from things that should not be moved on from. Forgetting was not the same as healing.

“Remember now or perish. Without your history, you are empty.”

We mourn for every zoti aleyu, cast away into the ocean, eaten or starved. But we do not mourn long. If there are six right here, then there are more somewhere else. Or there will be more.

When not properly fortified, a legacy is no more enduring than a wisp of plankton.

Now, though, reduced to a skeleton, she could build herself back up however she wanted.

Two-legs had specific ways of classifying the world that Yetu didn’t like. She remembered that, at least. They organized the world as two sides of a war, the two-legs in conflict with everything else.

Where the History saddened others, we felt only a glorious, burning anger. We liked the challenge of it. It suited us. Anger was our favorite emotion. We were at home in it. It gave us purpose.

These didn’t have to be contradictions. She let the multiple truths exist inside her as a way of meditating.

Who each of them was mattered as much as who all of them were together.

She had thrown away her ancestors. “You didn’t throw them away. You lived. You did what you needed to do to make sure you lived. Our survival honors ancestors more than any tradition,”

They each held pieces of the History now, divvied up between them. They shared it and discussed it. They grieved. Sometimes, they wanted to die. But then they would remember, it was done.

“Stay with me, and we will make a new thing. What’s behind us, it is done.”