Luster

by Raven Leilani

All I want is for him to have what he wants. I want to be uncomplicated and undemanding. I want no friction between his fantasy and the person I actually am. I want all that and I want none of it.

“I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible. I made mistakes with these men. I dove for their legs as they tried to leave my house. I chased them down the hall with a bottle of Listerine, saying, I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please, I’ll just revise.

During that week, there was more blood than reasonable. There was the vague feeling I had escaped something preposterous.

was seven years old, looking how I will always look, which is like I have a single biological parent, like my father has had no part in my creation, which, in a way, is the truth.

I recognize the look that passes between them, a look that is conspiratorial, that temporarily eschews the boundary between parent and child for the recognition of some mutual misery, in this case, a birthday party that neither of them wants to attend. The by-product of this alliance is that it often throws the other parent under the bus as a matter of course, though as a kid, this is what makes it great. When I was young, I didn’t understand it was cruel.

feel unlike myself, spry and nocturnal and inclined to believe that this pregnancy is part of the reason my paintings are any good. Because I can’t sleep knowing what is happening inside my body, and when I don’t sleep, I paint. I have never been so tired. I have never been so prolific. What if I make the appointment and they ask if I’ve done it before? What if I am a woman who has to do this twice?

He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier

A sunlit dream where I do better, where there is no father and my daughter and I move upstate and sometimes I yell at her while helping her with her homework, but ultimately we are pals, and she is someone I can talk to, ill-tempered and serious and leaving bowls of cold cereal around the house, off to kindergarten with noisy, ornate hair, because like Black mothers everywhere, I will be required to overdo it with the barrettes. And maybe it is not all great and in my single motherhood my bandwidth is shot with work and child-rearing and trying to get laid. Maybe I bring too many men into her life and she wishes she knew who her dad was, and I tell her that I don’t know, the months in Jersey like a brief, sunlit seizure. Maybe she is too much like me, too much like my mother, teetering silently on some horrific precipice in her teenage years until she comes out the other side as the woman I couldn’t be, a woman with good credit and hope and who is terrifying in her conviction to be whatever it is she wants to be.