When the Reckoning Comes

by LaTanya McQueen

A person moved through the world with no knowledge and no assurances, only hope and faith to guide them through the belief they were making the right decisions.

what Mira learned that day was how easy it was to let someone convince you of their truth instead of believing in your own.

Choosing to end themselves rather than go back, because at least death would be at their own hand, and there was freedom in that choice, and they would be free.

She felt shame for participating, for coming and being complicit. She felt shame for the circumstances that had led to a place like this existing. Shame for the realization that even after all these years of progress, this was where we’d come, to this corrupted version of the past we all thought we’d left behind.

The path to resistance was through what their bodies could do, and so they found ways to refuse at every turn.

We can’t love ourselves in the past, or whoever we thought we were. We got to love ourselves in the now.”

Weariness had aged him, but it had also changed who he was. Gone was the boy, bashful and sincere over the things he loved. The one who was self-conscious, yet daring when he needed to be, like how he’d been the one to stick up for Celine and Mira when they were kids. He was someone who knew what he deserved, and what he deserved was a better world than this.