Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir

by Brian Broome

The isolation and disconnection in my own life is near total. It is keeping me safe from my old troubles, but it keeps me apart at the same time. It is the bargain I have made and that maybe I deserve.

I have come to terms with the fact that I have somehow willingly allowed myself to be emptied out and refilled with devotion to you.

I never felt loved because I was looking for the wrong clues. I was looking for that love that comes from parents who aren’t stressed out all the time and are trying to make a way out of no way.

Looking at this little boy at the start of his life makes me wish I could start my own life over knowing that, yes, I was loved. Just not in ways that I could understand.

And, as he told me many times, he would rather kill me himself than watch white people do it.

And I wish you would have tried to be something else. Something more. Because there had to have been something more you wanted to share with the world.

“you don’t have to continue to be wretched.”