Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

“Get ahold of yourself,” I said to the woman in the mirror, but doing so felt cliché, like I was reenacting a scene from a movie, and so I started to feel like I didn’t have a self to get ahold of, or rather that I had a million selves, too many to gather.

It would have been kinder to lie, but I wasn’t kind anymore. Maybe I never had been.

Guilt and doubt and fear had already settled into my young body like ghosts haunting a house.

If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remind myself what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound. And what a wound my father leaving was.

It felt unfair, to pile my pain on top of hers, and so I swallowed it instead.

Katherine didn’t understand the gesture, or, if she did, she didn’t accept it. “I think it’s beautiful and important to believe in something, anything at all. I really do.”

If it makes you feel better, you should keep doing it. There’s no reason not to.”