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

by R. Eric Thomas

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. —MARY OLIVER, “DON’T HESITATE”

But life, of course, can quickly get complicated and human and not at all miraculous.

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.”

We must all, even in some small way, be angling toward hope.

I love a good Dateline investigation or British mystery novel or Gone Girl, and all of them are basically infomercials about the inherent danger of living anywhere with a lawn. Dateline investigations are never in crack houses. They are always in split-level homes owned by a dentist who snapped.

But I’m just saying no one has ever peered into the streetlamp-illuminated window of my third-floor urban apartment with a sinister glint in their eye, so draw your own conclusions.

Is there anything as fat with possibility as a crush?

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.

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.

(Have you ever been to the birthday party of someone who has a really mixed group of friends and the white people start singing the “regular” version of “Happy Birthday,” which, honestly, rivals “Streets of Philadelphia” for atonal glumness, and the black people launch into Stevie’s version and then everyone gets really confused because the white people have no idea what just happened?

In the absence of good, what is there?

I love when hot people nod at me; it reminds me that I exist.

The feeling of being alone, I’ve found, is the poison that has no taste. It seeps in slowly and easily; it never seems unusual.

Small talk is purposefully avoiding every interesting thing there is to say.

The idea was intriguing to me but only in the way that television is intriguing to a cat. I was pretty sure I didn’t give a shit about it, but because it was so foreign and yet so close to me, it piqued my interest.

I would remind people in my classes that the storyteller gets to choose the beginning and the end, often despite what happens in life.

What’s a red flag and what’s just a weird personal detail that you can spin into a charming anecdote? The line is thinner than you think.

I needed to be bolder if I was going to make something of myself.

Bad things happening to white people is a whole genre of horror movies, and I find it deeply disturbing. Put me down as wanting only good things to happen to white people.

And I have a lifelong quest to make everything as complicated as possible.

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.

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.

You’ll never catch me playing the devil’s advocate, honey. That’s how they get you.

We say these things build character; they make us who we are. And that’s true. But that doesn’t mean they don’t suck. It doesn’t mean winter isn’t cold.

You’ve got to be always thinking of how you’ll turn life events into #content,

Kind eyes are always a surprise to see in the flesh, because not everyone has them. I certainly don’t.

“Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo, which begins “The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.”

All we knew was that we liked to eat and we liked to talk and we wanted to keep doing those things, preferably simultaneously, for a long time. Which is as good a foundation for a relationship as any.

We were just commencing that period of life when the last of us who had been defined in the family system by being children were now undeniably adults, and that kind of thing always takes some getting used to.

As a family, we were sometimes quiet, sometimes funny. We didn’t mind silence, even though most of us were talkers.

I think it’s important to note that that takes work: family doesn’t just happen; welcome isn’t a neutral state. We have to tend to these things.

The stories of black life in this nation and prior to this nation have never been as well kept as the stories of white life.

Every family’s story is a tale of becoming, sometimes through oppression, sometimes through achievement, and sometimes simply through the current of time.

I’m sort of a nightmare, to be honest.

We don’t expect other humans to act sanely or with any sort of grace when they perceive scarcity, so it’s foolish to expect kids to.

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?

I know that I have a very expressive face that cannot tell a lie, and I have no problem deploying it to project my displeasure in literally any situation.

But deep down, I believe in a certain order. I like RSVPs, good service at restaurants, and polite party talk.

There is a moment, when things slide back to the more serious, that we feel a little guilty. Who cares about our little joys in such a time as this? Aren’t there more serious things to talk about? Have we called our senator today? I always feel weird about thoughts like that. In such a time as this, shouldn’t I be more serious?

I think it’s important to revel in the small things that make us joyful, to indulge when possible and not problematic, to steal laughter and hoard it.

And, in the end, I know that we are not at war with our terrible leaders. Instead, we are fighting against nihilism itself. We are fighting to care. What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all—it matters.

I’m obsessed with how bad the past must have smelled.

I can’t watch period drama because I become fixated on how every single person on-screen must reek.

Going back in time isn’t worth the aggravation. The scent will never leave your nostrils.

That’s also one of the issues with the present: a collective refusal to acknowledge the stink of the past.

The possibility of changing the present is never so alluring as when it comes about by changing the past.

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.

Here’s my living will, okay? I have no desire to survive the apocalypse.

The minute the cable goes out, I’m gone. If I can’t watch rebooted versions of television shows I used to love, what even is the point?