Red at the Bone

by Jacqueline Woodson

Two words spoken early enough, I’m pregnant, would have meant the end of my beginning. The end of so many beginnings.

How many hundreds of ancestors knew a moment like this?

This apology of a child, Iris, I didn’t mean to. Damn. I’m so, so sorry.

He liked to think about that. That two people had loved each other and made him.

He would give his own life to see Melody able to stay this young, to see her live her teenage life—all the years. He wanted to pull her to him now. Say, Hold on to yourself, Melody. Don’t get lost. He wanted to say again what he’d said to her so many times before. You’re loved, baby, you’re loved.

Thought one day she’d grow up and I’d walk her down the aisle and give her away. Truth is, though, she wasn’t mine to give.

Guess that’s where the tears came from, knowing that there’s so much in this great big world that you don’t have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you’ll have one less heartbreak in your life. Oh Lord. Some evenings I don’t know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

Age will do that to you. Soon as something starts coming to your mind, it snatches it back. Makes you forget the stuff you want to remember. Brings back the memories you’re busy trying to forget.

Something about memory. It takes you back to where you were and lets you just be there for a time.

So many people I’m sitting here missing today. Lord, tell me what You left me here for. I feel like I’ve been alive so long, so long. Time for You to take me too.

Like the characters in this story, we’re all here because of those who came before us. And our lives are as they are because of the events that happened long before we were born.