A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

When you think of me, picture a glistening wreck, something of a piece with the subliminal. The thing about the sublime is that at some point you have to look away.

Repression comes as naturally to some as breathing, I reminded myself.

For once, I wanted to be vivid, like a metaphor, like weather.

There were days I felt pummeled by language, when I was unable to write anything, and I assumed this was something I inherited from her.

It was a period marked by agony and hope, by the agony of hope.

She was a quaking “I” about to leap, like a doe that’s suddenly no longer a symbol, into the future.

We asked very little of each other, guarded each other’s peace and solitude when we did come together, which is Rilke’s trusted definition of love.

We will weave narratives of joy in which no one toes the edge of another’s existential fault line and calls it kinship.

How cruel, to live a life unhinged from meaninglessness, I thought, as I watched through the windshield as my mother pressed her face into her husband’s chest.

Even your laugh sounds a little unlike you.

I always thought that people who’ve come from hardship either never stop talking about what they’ve been through or don’t talk about it at all.

I don’t want it to open up old wounds, though perhaps they’ve never closed.

I wanted to take a photo and call it The Unwritability of Grief. I felt that I too could be photographed and labeled this way.

It made me pause, because what was nostalgia if not a kind of hunger?

it is our job to translate our individual language of suffering.

I decided that I didn’t want to conceal my fluttering body anymore.

Men who backed people into the corners of their lives, who set everything ablaze, who walked toward the fire and put their hands to it.

From some angles, it looked like a planet. From others, a beating heart.

She was one of many in a chorus that sang of flourishing and grief.

There’s so much language inside me. I feel like I’m going to explode with it, like light.

I give them space to think and exist, something I never had.

After all, Lena was the kind of mother who, like Donna, like Mary, would architect a world with whatever materials were available in which their children’s joy could be infinite.

I realized I had pitied the old man and he had likely pitied me too, that this shared pity enabled us to converse in the first place—it was our common idiom.

Humans are pitiable because we are unfree from the scripts inside another’s head; but we rebel.

Was I endeavoring to hear the sounds made when someone broke through a story they hadn’t written for themselves? At that moment I couldn’t think of anything else worth doing.

What is a human possibility? I wondered. Love? I had few reasons to believe that that was the case, but I believed it all the same.

This wasn’t an easy way to live, I knew. Still, I had no idea how to live otherwise.

What if I wanted to destroy myself as much as I wanted to be saved?

All I’m good for is love, I think.