nathan’s Reviews > They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us > Status Update

I dreamed myself into emotional survival but I wasn’t afforded an opportunity to live in my waking hours.

I don’t enjoy being heartbroken but I’m saying I enjoy the point of heartbreak where we convince ourselves that literally everything is on the table, and run into whatever will dull the sharp echoing for a night, or a week, until the week becomes a year. It’s the madness that both seduces and offers your own window out once it’s done with you.

At what volume, tone, and tener do you allow black people to enter your life for praise or for scolding.
The link between black music and black survival shows up most urgently when the stakes are at their highest. When I say that music is how black people have gotten free, I mean Harriet Tubman echoed songs along the Underground Railroad as a language.

We were wishes that never came true.

Life, if anything, is too long. We accumulate too much along the way. Too many heartbreaks, too many funerals, too many physical setbacks. It’s a miracle any of us survive at all.

It is a luxury to romanticize blood. It is a luxury to be able to fetishize violence.

Home is where the heart begins but not where it stays.

There will always be something great and tragic to celebrate.