mego wego

“Junior has always been bad. Bad is a self-fulfilling prophecy that, heard enough times, is believed: I am bad. The constant question, Why are you so bad? That time he stole. All the times he stole. He is always stealing, always wanting more. The answer he receives is always no -- no matter how practical and from the heart the thing is that he desires -- because he will surely ruin it, for he is bad and he must be punished for his badness. This is where we diverge. I become a black woman in the way I have been taught: silent, undeserving, inadequate in every way. And he becomes a black man: unpredictable, scary. Bad.”
― Melissa Valentine, The Names of All the Flowers

“When someone loves loudly, with everything they have in them, the withholding of that loud love, even briefly, feels impossible to endure.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I think about how often me and the boys I knew and know were taught to love each other through expressions of violence. How, if that is our baseline for love, it might be impossible for us to love anyone well, including ourselves.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance