How We Fight For Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

For a moment, I was the wolf outside the door. But then I was a black boy in America again, curled fetal in his twin bed, a bloody stone in hand, ears ringing with the rattle of chains. Silent, troubled, and helplessly myself.

Precisely because my grandmother loved—loves—me, she tightened her grip until it became so painful that I had no choice but to yank myself free.

I made myself a promise: even if it meant becoming a stranger to my loved ones, even if it meant keeping secrets, I would have a life of my own.

Of course I wanted to see the world, to experience its fullness. I wanted to be a real part of it, rather than the passing shadow I so often felt like. I wanted to devour the world. I sat there ablaze, struggling to apprehend a new, darkly radiant sense of self. I felt dangerous, evil even.

Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live. —MAMIE ELIZABETH TILL-MOBLEY

“Gay” was still an unspoken word in the house, an increasingly eloquent, encompassing silence.

The older I got, the more frequently my mother and I would push each other to the precipice of what we actually needed to say, only to back off just before either of us was forced to get more specific than vague allusions to “feelings” and “questions.” But this only meant that the unanswered questions became ever more loaded.

Her choreography and bravado were so certain she was almost scary, in the way that being in the same room with someone who is overconfident can make you feel shy.

She hugged me one more time, then got into the rental car without another word. She started to pull away before I could even register whether to laugh, or to chase her down with the thousand questions still on my mind. We did this to one another, shocking each other to distract both of us from an impending ache.

In that way, we were just like each other. We both allowed too deep of a contrast between our interiors and our exteriors. We both clung to self-assured masks that actually allowed us to cause ourselves more unseen harm.

And then I did exactly what I thought all people who love each other do: I changed the subject; I changed myself; I erased everything I had just said; I erased myself so I could be her son again.

I buried myself in the bodies of other men so I could feel something other than the depression that was rolling in like a fog bank.

Boys like us never really got away, it seemed. We just bought ourselves time. A few more gasps of air, a few more poems, a few more years. History hurt more than any weapon inflicted on us. It hit back harder than any weapon we could wield, any weapon we could turn ourselves into.

The sweetness we deny ourselves because the world is wailing.

Even now, I can hear it. I can hear the music ringing out. I can see my mother at the head of the table: the only one who could bring us all together, the only one who could tune us into any semblance of harmony. The sweetness was ours that day and, for once, no one at the table denied it.

Being in the same room with her felt like trying to push two magnets together from the wrong ends. A mother terribly worried about her daughter, a son terribly worried about his mother, in wholly incompatible ways.

Whenever I tried, however, I quickly found myself dragged under by a riptide. A story became a memory became a guilt-laced question before finally, there at the bottom of the sea, I’d find the same fact waiting for me: I was never going to see her again.

I felt more real, more like myself, than I ever had before. There were no more masks left for me to hide behind.

I couldn’t tell which hurt more: the onslaught of ideas about what could have been, or all the memories I had of what actually happened.

I cleaned out my mother’s apartment that summer. Next to her altar, I found a note card she’d been keeping with a list of what she called determinations. At the bottom was this: “I will travel and see the world with my son.”

I needed to wake up somewhere new; I needed everything I saw as soon as I opened my eyes to say clearly and definitely that my life had changed. Too much had happened for me to keep waking up surrounded by the lie of continuity.

Thank you to my therapist, David Witten.