All My Rage

by Sabaa Tahir

The sun hits the windows, painting her braided hair a dozen colors. I think of the pictures she has all over her room at her shithead uncle’s house, taken by a massive space telescope she told me about once. That’s what her hair is like, black and red and gold, the heart of space lit from within.

Wondering how someone who filled up a room could fit into a box so small.

Today is a poltergeist I’ll chain to the back of my brain, one forever linked to freezing desert wind and dirty asphalt and a loneliness so deep that it shouldn’t belong to this world.

Ama’s funeral flashes in my mind, those moments when she was lowered to the earth, and my abu clutched at the coffin moaning, “Vapas dey dey.” Give her back. How can a moment like that exist in the same world as Jamie’s pettiness? The gulf between them is so vast that it makes no sense.

Rage. That’s what this feeling is, eating me up.

I think of the way denial can weave its way through a family, whisper gentle lies, and make itself at home.

I wonder if it will be like this when I am twenty-eight and thirty-eight and one hundred and eight. If I will one day die with that white space still open and gaping inside me, sharp-toothed and forever unknown.

They were not kittens, these two. They were small, careful birds, chirping in a language only they knew. A language of pain and memory.

There’s such understanding between them that I have to look away. I wonder what it’s like to be with someone who can love you through your rage.

She had to make her peace with the loss, accept that it was part of her life, and find meaning in it. She had to learn that despite the loss, she would keep going.

As he speaks, I think of everything my mother taught me: How to love someone unconditionally. That joy can be found in small victories. That forgiveness is a gift to the person who grants it and to the person who receives it.

This Is How You Lose the Time War and War Girls. Legend and They Both Die at the End and The Beautiful.

The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson.

“There’s more to life than the things in front of you,” Santiago says, and now, finally, I listen. “Sometimes we hold on to things we shouldn’t. People. Places. Emotions. We try to control all of it, when what we should be doing is trusting in something bigger.”

Rage can fuel you. But grief gnaws at you slow, a termite nibbling at your soul until you’re a whisper of what you used to be.

Oh, my children. My little ones. I have such dreams for you both. The world is right, finally. For here, in this sweet, deep night, I see now that you were always two halves of a whole, two hands interlaced, two voices raised to a melody sung in time. Bear witness, then, to the beauty of each other’s lives. Bear witness and burn bright as one.