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“Sometimes, agreeing to the same lie is what makes a family family, Margot.”
Margot remembered when she had moved to Seattle eight years ago and made her first white friends—people who seemed to navigate their identities, their skin tones, their appearances so easily, in such an invisible way, as if the world had been created for them, which, in a sense, it had.
She had loved her mother more than anyone but was also deeply ashamed of her—her poverty, her foreignness, her language, the lack of agency in her life. She did not know how to love anyone, including herself, without shame.
The message had always been that women without men lacked shape, women without men were always waiting for them to appear like images in a darkroom bath.
It must’ve been a relief after a long day in a foreign country to be immersed in images where you belonged just by sound and gesture and face. How much language itself was a home, a shelter, as well as a way of navigating the larger world.
She yearned for some sign from the universe that said, You are doing fine.
It was okay to yearn for the impossible every now and then as long as in the yearning you discovered something about yourself.
