Nightcrawling

by Leila Mottley

Funeral day is a reckoning, when we mimic thieves and really just find excuses for our tears, then light up, eat until we have never felt fuller, and find somewhere to dance. Funeral day is the culmination of all our past selves, when we hold our own memorials for people we never buried right.

Tupac might just be shivering in his grave because my brother don’t know how to spit, and the only words I can hear in the mess of his tongue are bitch and ho and this nigga got chains and I wanna tell him this room knows how he hurled into our toilet for two weeks after Daddy died because his body cannot bear grief.

Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up. I don’t say goodbye to Shauna and she doesn’t even turn around to watch me leave, to head back out to a sky that sunk into deep blue while my brother asked me to do the one thing I know I shouldn’t, the one thing Shauna cared enough to warn me about: hollow myself out for another person who ain’t gonna give a shit when I’m empty.

That was before I learned that life won’t give you reasons for none of it, that sometimes fathers disappear and little girls don’t make it to another birthday and mothers forget to be mothers.

The door creaks just like I expect it to. Houses give away all their secrets at the door. Dee’s is full of scratches. Mine doesn’t even have a working lock no more.

art is the way we imprint ourselves onto the world so there is no way to erase us.

Most white women default to thinking they own every room they walk into, and Marsha is no different.

She is the bottom of the ocean, where all the magic hides beneath too many layers of dark and water and salt.