More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We’ve been biting our tongues as if our silences will save us or freeze us in a time that required nothing more than just being.
I devoured these books; every single one of them drew me in with its words until I was so deep in each world that any ending seemed too abrupt, and I would just sit with the closed book on my lap, the characters like old friends to whom I had just said good night.
the absurdity of the prejudice he endured, the fucked-up way that white supremacy slyly slips a chip on your shoulder, only to turn around and innocently question its position there.
“Resentment” is too sharp a word—it’s just so unforgiving—but not long after we turned twelve something close to it stained and spread between us, like ink on wet paper.
Our mother is not well. I can scarcely remember a time when she was. She is a vast garden of water-hungry flowers in a land of perpetual drought.
She was beautiful in an impossible way, a delicate thing. Too soft for this world,
For a long time, even before the bad thing, Taiye felt plagued with, with … “shame” is too blatant and not quite insidious enough a word for the feeling that she wore, draped over her shoulders like a water-laden blanket. There is a way that she can look up at you through heavy-lidded, dark wells for eyes. It will fill you with this unassailable desire to unburden her. She doesn’t know it, but it was this very thing that endeared her to her lovers. The magnetic gravity of the planet that is her.
“She’s just a bit broken.”
All this space between us now is dense, heavy. I know that it’s not normal for sisters. It hasn’t always been like this. Even though I was seething before, I don’t think it’s supposed to be like this, not anymore.
Sometimes I nod at the memories and let them pass as quietly as I can stand it.
She understood that kindness was a practice, the same with patience and humility.
IKENNA KNEW THAT THE ONLY WAY TO MOVE FORWARD was simply to move forward.
And all that staying away, I can’t say it was worth it. I can’t really name precisely what I was staying away from. It feels like a loss.
I’d hated my body for a long time, hated all the ways I felt it had betrayed me.
It was about beauty, yes, but it was also about belonging. People treat you with kindness and an invitation to belong if they like the way you look, and every time I looked in the mirror, I saw someone who was almost as beautiful as Taiye, nearly as lucky, but never quite meeting the mark.
Body too soft in all the wrong ways—and marked by an invisible unerasable ugliness.
if it was something else, equally as simple: to be wanted in return by someone you want. No obligation, just desire. To be chosen.
“Can asks if you are capable, may asks permission.”
That sort of thing required sacrifice, and she wasn’t yet sure of the price.
Kambirinachi considered loving Banji in a way that didn’t make space for consequences.
She, too, was incredibly sick of her own shit. But one cannot abandon oneself, try try try as one might.
Of a time in which the hollowing echo of loneliness didn’t ring so loud in her steps, her voice, and her body. None of her indulgences had yet silenced the shrill call of such a vast empty; still, she latched, she let go, she consumed, unhinged the jaw of her soul to drink whatever was given. And, still, nothing satiated.
The kind of kinship established due to a common sadness, shared loneliness that becomes bearable through laughter and food and the good company of one who understands.
“This thing, happiness, is it actually a luxury? Am I a fool to want to be happy in this life?
INDEED, WE ALL HAVE OUR BULLSHIT.
Desiring to be entirely consumed by any and every moment that quenched the hungry howling loneliness that sat curled down down inside herself.
It’s just that beginnings are so seductive, the promise of possibilities.
they had this real good love, though they rarely named it that. Instead, they said things like: I’ve been thinking about you, missing you. Did you eat yet? I brought you food. How is your heart? How is your body? How can I make your day better? Let me help. Let me take that for you. It was a salve for both their wounds, a tender balance between their respective demons.
Life is an ambivalent lover. One moment, you are everything and life wants to consume you entirely. The next moment, you are an insignificant speck of nothing. Meaningless.
It’s a wound, you know, this thing that has her believing she is shameful.
Her love is just too heavy,
It’s something about being in love looking like all the things you’ve lost finding you once more.
