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March 3 - March 20, 2020
my brother’s white suburban sneakers make him look like an adopted refugee from some forgotten war.
Around the table we are his audience and his life is the text.
Those nights he swore we’d be better off without him. Those nights he swore we’d be better off if he were dead.
Grief takes root inside people.
Does the silence hide as much as the darkness does?
My grandmother knows where she’ll go when she dies. She calls that place her truest home.
The house mushrooms around me into a shadow.
“Ali?” she says. Tonight I let her call me that. “Are we going to die, too?” “No,” I say. “Shh, just go to sleep. We aren’t going to die.” “But she died.” I consider this. “Yes, but we aren’t going to. That’s a kind of dying you only do when you’re little. We’re big now.” I am seven and she is five. “We aren’t going to die.” As I say this, I realize suddenly that I am lying. That we will, one day. I hope she doesn’t know this. I hope she doesn’t know about forever. “Promise?” she says. “Promise,” I say. And my sister is quiet after that. But I lie awake in the dark for a long time.
Funny where the mind wants to lodge. Funny where it wants to think it can make a difference.
They arrange the memory as carefully as a script.
The people in this story still want to believe they can control the past, wipe it clean just as a crime scene is scrubbed.
For now, just understand this: They need to leave the past behind.
she’ll walk a hard line between her grief and her rage.
I want—I need—to understand.
The way rot wheedles in, the awareness of nearby death that creeps up your nostrils, crawls over your skin.
Death is what I am afraid of. Death is what my sister was lost to; death is what the grown-ups fear for my brother; death is what I have nightmares of.
Each morning, through careful ministrations taken while my family slumbers upstairs, the house is erased and begins anew.
No past behind him, no future ahead. Only road.
swallows the silence down.
My father often told us stories of his childhood, but my mother rarely did, and I felt about the cabinet as I felt about my mother’s past. It was a thing guarded from me, and held both the allure of anything forbidden and a kind of silence as solid as stone.
Who knows why the past comes through in the moments it does; who knows why a secret suddenly becomes too much to keep?
Both my parents I come to know better and differently through their books.
The trip is beautiful, and the trip is a disaster.
This is the logic I will never find an answer to, the way in my family a hurt will always be your hurt or my hurt, one to be set against the other and weighed, never the family’s hurt. Is what happens in a family the problem of the family, or the problem of the one most harmed by it? There is a cost to this kind of adversarial individualism.
To feel empty is delicious relief, and from that day on, I have another secret.
They must see the way their daughter has gone sullen and silent. But we don’t talk about it.
Marianne Moore: your thorns are the best part of you.
But while I am flinging myself around to escape the past, my brother is papering himself in it.
Are we already who we will always be?
He doesn’t know what burns more badly, the shame or the anger.
this is a game of telephone I am playing with the past.
person can be angry and still feel shame. A person can burn with hate at his mama and still love her enough to want to be something that will make her proud. A person can feel overwhelmed by all he wants to be and see no way to get there.
and if I concentrate on the
dark wet feeling of his tongue in my mouth I can make everything else go away. It’s like dancing,
and I know, somehow know, that nothing will hurt us tonight. Not when so much has. This is me getting away, finally. This is me throwing off the past.
Give me normalcy, that’s what I want. Anything else can burn.
But she must remind herself not to wonder too hard. Wondering is how you get mixed up in other people’s troubles.
She must expect the loneliness so much she doesn’t even notice it.
I am struck immediately by this idea, that the future was seeded secretly into the present, the present seeded secretly into the past.
And above all we are prisoners of the story we tell about ourselves,
We are so determinedly fine it must be overwhelming for them to have a daughter who has suddenly shown up with the marks of all that is not fine so visibly on her.
I just thought his attention meant that I was worthy of love, could be loved, and that I wasn’t broken.
Where does the mind go in these moments, while the body trembles?
When it breaks, I cry. The wave flows out of me. My breath slows, and I can feel the tears on my cheeks, hot, though I am not aware of them leaving me or even of any feeling of sadness. I am a sack into which the wave has broken, and now it must come leaking out of me. I have been a vessel; I am now only a throughway. Who I am outside this feeling becomes as irrelevant as time.
All across the nation it is like this. Laws passed in blusters of well-meaning. Laws failing, because so rarely do the notifications work and so much of the burden falls on already burdened parents.
The future is coming, eleven years ahead. It sends its long low warning signal over the pages of this story.
Evidence, as much as the files are. Of the boy, when he was still a boy and not the murderer. Of the girl, when she was still a girl and not the victim’s mother. The future was waiting for them, unknown and unseen.
I feel for my mother. With her determination not to talk about the past, I must sometimes seem to her a walking time bomb. A bomb made of time.
My grandfather is a surgeon of stories. He splices them together to make something new.
my memories like a filmstrip burned black at the center, and her silence.
