The Perishing

by Natashia Deón

We’re all on the verge of somebody else’s violence.

This is eerily true which is why so many are afraid. At the same time it is why we must choose to live as audaciously as possible.

there’s no point in trying to outlive the date you’ve been given. Folks like us, we just need to leave something good behind.

Legacy is everything.

Because some people are bonded over lifetimes. Not a “soul mate”—a wasted term—but a kindred spirit.

No, not spirit. The inarticulable part of ourselves.

Life after life in new bodies, new cities, and new countries where I’ve always been Black, not always a woman.

We’re supposed to forget ourselves and each other after this. But I remember because I’m broken now. He won’t remember, because he’s not. This is my undoing.

But language is not just a people’s words. Language is their way of thinking. It controls what we think, limits how we think.

To have found her new identity in the same place where she’d once been someone else—in her kitchen, her car, her doctor’s office, her marriage.

If you’ve never stood in the glow of a fat woman, you’ve missed a sunrise.

“we have to engage in our world or the world will only show you who you are. Or what you expected.”

people’s permission to accept your own blessed life. Your life is magical in whatever way it is. Accept it and be glad in it, despite other people. It’ll be over soon. For most of you.

Others will call your joy a fiction or call you a liar or immoral or dangerous for your happiness, but their conclusions are only a reflection of their limited imaginations, their own abilities, their being stuck in their lives. It’s not a rewrite of yours.

Power can be misused, especially by leaders who want compliance, not commitment.

Commitment requires shared dreams, connections, mutual respect, earned relationships, valued input, and allowing unique participation. Compliance is “do what I say do”—a dictator.

doesn’t know how our bodies, our blood, and our veiled memories keep the score.

My healing, now, is a matter of reminding my soul to put old postures and symptoms in the past where they belong.

And I’ll teach you about money so you won’t be afraid of it. So you’ll learn to give your money permission to take care of you. But also, you need to learn to think critically.”

Death should be front page, center, for the way it changes survivors.

Because there is nothing natural about a body that does not carry its scars.

“I’ve only worked on stories about death.” “Which have always been stories about the living,” he says.

The brain motivates us based on what it’s learned—what’s helpful or hurtful—so emotions rise and roll before we’ve made what we think is an emotion-free, rational, and reasonable decision.

“They taught me. They taught me that when you can recognize a pattern, you can change an outcome. Change a pattern in your own life, you change your whole life. But I tell you the truth, the only pattern worth repeating is kindness.”

So, no. It didn’t matter my skin color. I couldn’t let it matter. People I saw were hurting, I was a nurse and couldn’t let how others behaved affect how I treated them.

“Mercy assumes you have power. Something you can decide to give or not. Compassion is kind anyway.

“Sadness can be the hardest thing to let go of when there are no visible scars. Scars are the only proof a person has to show that something went terribly wrong.”

“It’s 1931, and even now, with all of the race separation by neighborhoods, jobs, marriage and churches, with police, no one will see herself a bigot. She’ll simply point to someone more bigoted than she is and say, ‘See, there’s a bigot.’”

“All abortions should be mourned,” Aimee says. “Even the ones we choose.” The men gasp.

think it must be beautiful to be an American who believes that every good thing that happens to him and is denied to others happens because of his hard work and good morals.

Money is power and only fear is greater than that.”

To be a wife, it seems, is to forfeit every gift God gave you to serve your husband. Sure, you repurpose yours for his but usually that means for children, so I don’t blame Jefferson’s wife when last weekend after the funeral, as our procession passed Jefferson’s house, she walked across her lawn and through the front door, packed her bag, and was on the bus back to Alabama by the end of that hour.

“We live in a time where people think their personal opinions about facts are equal to facts.

you’re going to work for me, I want to empower you to be you. Not me.

People who ask for advice ask because they don’t want to take full responsibility for their decisions. They want somebody else to blame if things go sideways.

you don’t have to punish a person with prison to hold them accountable. Sometimes the right deterrent is a loss that matters to the one who did it—status, position, money, family. Yes, sometimes freedom. But justice could be a permanent reminder of what you did—your dead child-passenger from your own DUI. Lou’s was the life that held itself out in front of me—punished.

Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person.

Huey P. Newton once said, “The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution.

I’m minding my integrity for them today. Because if anything I’ve done or said in this life is worthy, it won’t begin to live boldly until after I’m dead. It’s the truth of all greatness.

“No good thing is destroyed,” he says, talking like a riddle. “Things are just liberated from the shadows.”

Escalations against brown bodies, I knew, were often caused by those who already had plans to prey on those bodies

if the opportunity ever arose.

These members of our community will beat windows the way exonerated policemen beat Black bodies.

Real violence has no warning, no time-outs.

Real violence has no rules.

“If you choose to do it, it’s not about you honoring your own beliefs or feelings. The only question for yourself is will you set yourself aside?”

because most of us live in triage. We spend most of our lives coping or distracted, taking care of

Were thirty-six of us,” she says. “We appear at a certain age every time. Vulnerable every time because people with no history are at risk. Children have it worse.”

“The legacy of enslavement affects everything we see here. Even the relationship between the descendants of the enslaved and the descendants of enslavers.

But never before the slave trade, that debt pass down through blood and make slavery an inheritance, attached to color. Undiluted evil,” she says, shaking her head.

“There are helpers in everybody’s life.

“And our survival depends on our collective abilities, not our individual might. That’s what it means to be human.”

Community is our survival on so many levels.