Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

My aunt was saying, “That. That is what crazy looks like.” But instead what I heard was my mother’s name.

I’ve always found that traffic on a bridge brings everyone closer to their own personal edge.

done. I wanted, above all else, to be good. And I wanted the path to that goodness to be clear. I 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.

Holy is the black woman’s hair.

We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do.

I went quiet and my mother went insane.

“There is no living thing on God’s Earth that doesn’t come to know pain sometime.”

We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. 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.