Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

crackled like car radios being tuned, searching for the right, the clearest, sound.

Whenever I listened to his friends speak about issues like prison reform, climate change, the opioid epidemic, in the simultaneously intelligent but utterly vacuous way of people who think it’s important simply to weigh in, to have an opinion, I would bristle. I would think, What is the point of all this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying problems, circling them?

Now I understand that we have a subconscious life, vibrant and vital, that acts in spite of “ourselves,” our conscious selves.

my time on the East Coast, where beauty was hard won, where every brilliant day had to be savored, the memories of them stored like acorns buried underground by industrious squirrels, just to get you through those punishing winters.

all of those years were beginning to write themselves onto her sunken cheeks, her hands, hardened from labor.

There are so many things I wish I could forget, but maybe “forget” isn’t quite right. There are so many things I wish I never knew.

What I’m saying is I didn’t grow up with a language for, a way to explain, to parse out, my self-loathing. I grew up only with my part, my little throbbing stone of self-hate that I carried around with me to church, to school, to all those places in my life that worked, it seemed to me then, to affirm the idea that I was irreparably, fatally, wrong. I was a child who liked to be right.

listening to the way time and guilt had changed his voice,

I dragged the steam cleaner out from the nether reaches of the closet and steamed the living room carpet, emptying the grayish water into the bathtub over and over again. It soothed me to see all of the filth travel down the drain, leaving nothing but cleaner and cleaner water in its stead. I wanted my life to look like that process. I wanted my mother and me to come out of this difficult period clear, free.

I, too, have spent years creating my little moat of good deeds in an attempt to protect the castle of myself.

I was doing what everyone else did, trying to dress up depression, trying to hide it. For what? For whom?