Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

The Color Purple and Giovanni’s Room and David Rakoff’s Fraud

Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy.

There’s a Nayyirah Waheed quote: “If someone does not want me, it is not the end of the world. But if I do not want me, the world is nothing but endings.”

I had, on occasion, posted something funny online that friends shared with their friends who shared with their friends, eventually giving whatever I’d written a temporary social lift. That’s how the internet works, and the first time it happened on Facebook—when my blog post about how expensive Beyoncé concert tickets were got 100,000 page views—I thought I was famous. The internet will quickly remind you that you are not famous; you just did this one thing this one time and that was yesterday so why are we still talking about it?

Did I have a plan? No. Did it work out? Seems like it. It’s easy for me to see the blind luck at play and hard for me to see the parts of me that put in the work.

This is not to suggest that Dr. King’s famous quote is wrong. Rather, justice may be a lot farther than we think. I’m a Bend Truther. And yet, we get out of bed, sometimes we give speeches, we have kids and/or dogs, we take those kid-dogs to Washington, DC, and we show them that place in stone where it says the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice as if that’s something they’ll see in their lifetime. Why? Hope. That’s the only thing I can come up with. We must all, even in some small way, be angling toward hope.

When the weight of it all threatened to overtake her, my mother, with a lightness, would sigh, “There’s never any trouble here in Bubbleland.” It became a relief valve, a code word, a cry for help. It also served as a guiding metaphor. The world outside was troublesome, but the house and the world my parents built for us within it was a bubble. A delicate, permeable utopia.

Though we couldn’t necessarily afford the resources that some of my classmates’ families could, my parents used everything at their disposal to expand the walls of our bubble. They filled our home with new experiences and ideas; they took every opportunity to expose us to the worlds outside of our neighborhood; they told us about the things they couldn’t yet show us. They crafted new spaces inside our minds and our imaginations just waiting to be filled up with details and experiences.

No. I’m telling you this because it was a moment that felt both strange and familiar, and I tucked it away inside myself, to fidget with and worry at until its rough parts disappeared and it shone.

Like, you are forsaken out there. If you call the police, they let you know their anticipated arrival time in days. And who wants to live that far from a Costco? You’re so rich you’ve started to inconvenience yourself. Look at your life.

My father had told the florist that his oldest son was going to prom and he needed the best corsage they’d ever made. The florist delivered a creation that was essentially a bouquet attached to an elastic band. Electra had trouble lifting her arm. The corsage had its own gravitational pull. I think of that corsage a lot when I think about how well my dad loves me, that enormous wrist garden a physical manifestation of joy and pride and care.

Perhaps the thing that is even more overflowing with possibility than a crush is love. In whatever form it takes, from whatever context it is drawn. With a crush, after all, there are sort of only two outcomes when you get down to it: it will bloom or it will wither. But love? Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.

When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.

I started staying in on Tuesdays and glowering at the walls while drinking cappuccino. This was not satisfying at all. In retrospect, I realize what I wanted to do was migrate inside, meet some people, kiss some eyelids.

It’s strange when the thing behind the door isn’t terrifying or wonderful, but rather just plain.

I could smell Quentin’s fabric softener mixing with whatever mysterious aroma was just himself. Little molecules of himself secreted themselves inside me.

It was something else altogether. It wasn’t a collision, but an expansion. I hadn’t expected that. I felt like I was drifting toward an understanding of myself that I couldn’t comprehend. At

I love when hot people nod at me; it reminds me that I exist. But something in me broke a little bit when this particular hot guy nodded at me. I remembered what I looked like and felt the need to shout, “Sorry to bother your eyes with all this. Work in progress!

This was my idea of heaven. In a grooming situation, I really don’t need to be around a lot of other people. This goes for haircuts, manicures, massages, trying on clothes, walking, talking, existing, etc.

I can’t say, however, if it’s what Jay wanted. I assumed it was because I assumed that’s what a relationship was: getting everything you want exactly the way you want it, a melding of minds but not really a melding so much as my mind staying the same and the other person just sort of being subsumed. That may sound bad to you but I encourage you to think of it as romantic instead.

One of my spiritual gifts is the ability to spiral out of control at the smallest provocation, and a creature who knows the access code to hell is no small provocation. I started rethinking our entire relationship as we drove back from Jersey into Philadelphia. If Jay loves these dark things so much, I thought, who must he be? Either he is just a different kind of person, someone who likes scary things, or he is conspiring with the elf, the devil, and Pontius Pilate to try to steal my soul. I couldn’t stomach the idea of the latter, so for most of our time together I chose to believe the former. But it never really went away.

We found ourselves on either side of the crack, and though we tried to put it back together, it became clear that it was made up of a thousand tiny cracks that had accumulated over time. We wanted to be together but the earth had moved.

It smelled like biting into that perfect peach you get on that first truly warm day after a long, hard winter. The peach that reminds you, as juices run down your hand, that being alive is generally a good and pleasant thing and you should keep doing it.

You’ve heard of spring cleaning? This was fall hoarding.

And the empty spaces, where his artwork or his favorite chair used to be, haunted me. For months after he left, I would wake up every morning and refuse to get out of bed until I’d managed to convince myself not to get the lyrics to “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” tattooed on my body that day. Like, I was sad in so many creative ways.

Honestly, I see very little difference between Church and a Beyoncé concert. Maybe that’s the core of my theology: if it makes you feel something ineffable, if it’s bigger than you and yet deeply personal, if it sometimes involves a fog machine, it’s Church.

We had the easiness that comes from knowing the same stories and knowing which parts you’re supposed to say at what time. I often wonder who the audience is for those stories, the ones everyone gathered has heard every year, the ones most of us lived through. Maybe they’re not for anyone outside of the circle. Maybe the telling is the metronome by which we set the beating of our hearts.

It reminded me, all of it, of so many dinners that had come before. There were moments I would look at David animatedly talking to my parents in the warm light of the dining room I’ve eaten in my whole life and I’d fall out of time. All of this was new, but also so familiar—in both meanings of the word.

Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?

At this particular moment, I am on one of those detox diets because I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been and I kind of don’t feel good all the time, and it occurs to me that maybe they are related and if the world is going to end, do I really want to pass on without having tried one of those fad diets at least once? Anyway, just in case we don’t go to war, I want to look as good in my fifties as Angela Bassett does, so I’ve cut out sugar and dairy and pretty much everything great for a month. I have decided to live, everyone! I’m living! Put me on the cover of a magazine. Kristen is eating the exact opposite of my meal, because wine and cheese are actually what living tastes like.

You get to find out how it ends. You get to see time unspool before your eyes and then knit itself back together again, hopefully better, hopefully brighter, hopefully overflowing with cheese groves.

I can’t help but think constantly about the end of the world. I don’t want to. I want to prepare cheese platters and drink champagne with friends. I want to live my life. But I cannot escape the end of the world. Headlines declare the end of everything from democracy to the climate itself. Disaster movies and post-apocalyptic movies are all the rage. And I don’t want to alarm you, but I am aging. Our time will come to an end.

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things,” Joan Didion wrote.

What is more romantic than the sudden revelation of the thing you didn’t even dare to hope for?

The internet becomes an external force, a pulsing id, humanity’s dark pit, rather than a projection of self. I think this is interesting because while so much of the internet is consumption, we are sharing—either willfully on social media or unknowingly through cookies—who we are and what we want.

It’s in this place where something new is being built, where people are united in one goal, with one voice, where the future is hard to make out but, yes, it’s there. We’re there. Better and more complicated.

I realize that this night in this church is the world that they will know, this is the world they will see as normal, this is the world they will inherit. A world made by people of all colors and sexualities and ages and faiths and gender expressions who have traveled many roads toward hope. And though we crowd the dance floor in the space that has been made specifically for us, our presence seems to create even more space, for those like us, for those yet to be.

You’re exactly who you need to be. Each of you. It may not feel like it; it may seem like it would be much easier being anyone else. You may look back at the person you were at one point and wish that you could instead be the person you are now at that far distant, unreachable point in the past. But you had to be who you were to get to who you are. Every page in the story is successive; they’re all numbered and bound like a book.

The only story I can tell you is my own. And in that story, you keep turning the pages. That’s hope. We hope with words and we hope with deeds. And in so doing, manifest the things that we need, the things that fulfill us, the things that give us life when we fear that all is lost.