All My Rage

by Sabaa Tahir

I’ll survive this. I’ll live. But there’s a hole in me, never to be filled. Maybe that’s why people die of old age. Maybe we could live forever if we didn’t love so completely. But we do. And by the time old age comes, we’re filled with holes, so many that it’s too hard to breathe. So many that our insides aren’t even ours anymore. We’re just one big empty space, waiting to be filled by the darkness. Waiting to be free.

But mostly it taught me that music can be more of a home than four walls and a roof.

Salahudin cocks his head. He tries to smile. I want to tell him that he doesn’t have to.

Maybe he felt like I did—like writing down the worry and fear would make it sharper, honing the edges until it could cut like a knife.

People always see the wrong things. Jamie looked at me and saw a cheater. Ortiz looks at Salahudin and sees an abuser. But they’ll look at Jamie and see a popular girl instead of a racist asshole. They’ll look at Riaz and see a savior who took in his orphaned niece instead of a monster.

My son. I wished I could tell her how he looked at me when he was born. I had never been closer to heaven than I was then, when the fabric between this world and the next was breached for one ineffable moment as I gazed into my child’s eyes for the first time.