Speak No Evil

by Uzodinma Iweala

hard right over the easy wrong.

I can feel my heart separate from the rest of my body. I want to hand it to the frothing old man in front of me and say, take it. It’s yours, because it has always been yours, if not for your sperm, your food, and the school fees that you pay on my behalf, then who and where would I be? Nothing. I am because you are.

My brain searches for something like strength or dignity, but the space before my eyes is blank and empty, except for this pain.

Do I want it? I want so many things, so many competing things.

Niru, this is a very serious matter you know, your parents, myself, we are all here because we are concerned. Well maybe you shouldn’t be. Maybe you should just let me be. I’ve done everything right. I get good grades. I come to church, I believe in God, I’m going to Harvard. You make it seem like it would be better if I murdered someone.

We live such different lives with such different worries. Who has time to think about sexual orientation when there is no food to eat, no money for school fees, no doctor in sight when you get sick.

I’m still me, I want to say to him, your son, but that would hardly help if I am currently everything wrong with the world.

OJ says you can only feel your skin at your best and worst moments so right now I can feel all of my skin, on my fingers, on my face, full of itch and fire.

I don’t fight battles I can’t win OJ tells me when I complain about our parents. It makes life less difficult.

Sometimes I stare at the family that owns me and I wish I were a different person, with white skin and the ability to tell my mother and my father, especially my father, to fuck off without consequence, and sometimes I stare at the white cards of Bible verses Reverend Olumide has gifted me and think that there is still a chance to change my ways.

See over there, I can be me, he says. I smile but it makes me sad. I haven’t found any safe spaces.

Sometimes I wonder who my mother might be if she weren’t married to my father.

I’ve fucked up. The less I’ve said the better things have been,

Not that I don’t see the point, but I’m tired of running in circles while thinking that I’m making progress.

My parents do not say things like I’m proud of you or I love you often—my mother more than my father, which is still almost never. They show their love by paying our tuitions, OJ says, and by putting food on the table.

the kind of woman who has made certain choices in support of my ambition without fully understanding the why behind my ambition, who is too proud to ask my parents for money, but not too proud to stay on their insurance

because your words, “it’s not how pretty you look while you’re doing it, it’s whether you cross the finish line” have kept me in this race.