Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

I went into the hard sciences so that I wouldn’t have to be around emotional women.

Or when I wished I had a job that paid me more than a seventeen-thousand-dollar stipend to stretch through

My brother died of a heroin overdose three months later.

“No, you’re not,” Geoffrey said. “Black people can’t be princesses.”

The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”

In other words, many, many years down the line, once we’ve figured out a way to identify and isolate the parts of the brain that are involved in these illnesses, once we’ve jumped all the necessary hurdles to making this research useful to animals other than mice, could this science work on the people who need it the most?

My memories of him, though few, are mostly pleasant, but memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It’s those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.

Yes, she’s insufferable, but she’s ours and so we must

suspect that this is why I excelled at math and science, where the rules are laid out step by step, where if you did something exactly the way it was supposed to be done, the result would be exactly as it was expected to be.

“How many of you have already had sex?” the woman asked once we had settled in. Everyone looked around but no one raised their hand, not even the pregnant girl.

“I only wanted Nana,” she said, “and now I only have you.”

Because we were the animal daring enough to take boats out to sea, even when we thought the world was flat and that our boats would fall off the edge, we discovered new land, different people, roundness.

But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.

“I think it’s beautiful and important to believe in something, anything at all. I really do.”