I try to go to my parents’ for Christmas, but inevitably we get into an argument and I end up taking the bus back to Spanish Harlem. On the way home, I notice the Indian restaurant on the corner is open. I order takeout and spend the evening with my roommate’s ragdoll cat, a bowl of bhindi masala and Dreamgirls on HBO. To this day, it remains my favourite Christmas of all time.
This is the great fuckery of falling out of love in the age of technology: So many invisible threads hold us together. She lingers forever in my profile picture album and my iMessage logs. Even when I try to avoid these archives, a robot can coopt her name and remind me just what it felt like to love her.
We were walked to the slave quarters, some still standing, others restored. They were basic shacks, between three and five to a room. Although tiny, they were bigger than I thought they would be. We were told of the French colonial slave-keeping laws, which were apparently more humane than those of American, British or Spanish colonial laws. When we were told that the slaves were encouraged to be married, that young girls must be sold along with their mothers and kept from work until the age of fourteen, and eventually buried alongside their masters in the Catholic cemetery, we caught ourselves doing that raised-eyebrow, pompous nod of surprise until we were able to remind each other that these people, however less oppressed than their neighbors, were still fucking slaves.
We told some really incredible stories this year, and you won’t want to miss a thing.
I had lived the privilege of a blackness that was reaffirmed in society, and found myself reflected in every echelon of power, and tale of despair. My experiences had been normalized, rather than nominal. I had walked streets and avenues, surrounded by nothing but brown shiny faces and had never experienced the color of my skin as a coat to be put on outside my home. It is because of this that I spend the first two years in America looking for faces like mine in every public space, finding them, counting them, willing them to multiply so that my skin can feel at ease again. It never happens.
Fuck normal; who wants to be normal? I choose this abnormal, absurd world filled with unashamed characters that have multiplied in me the gift of love, of eyes wide open, of a curious soul and an accepting mind. Who have given unto each other something the world can’t: a sense that this is the norm, that what we are doing isn’t exceptional, or strange, but merely the way things have always been. That’s what home feels like. There is no consciousness of your otherness, you simply are. It is a place that does not seek to define you by the things you are “not,” but rather by an affirmation of your presence and being.
When the ceramic snow village came down from the attic and the tree went up in my living room, everything was going to be okay. Christmas would make it okay. My mom threw dishes, smashed them against the floor and the wall, but she never even chipped her Southern Living Christmas china. My dad wasn’t home very much; he had to travel all the time for work, but he never missed a holiday moment. He chopped down the tree. He untangled the lights. My dad made a “Santa Stops Here” sign for my birthday one time, and he was right: During the regular year, we had to choose between crutches for my broken ankle or cigarettes for my mom, but Santa always gave everyone in my family something so good. My mom bought elves and she bought angels. She displayed them in every nook of our house. Nobody got slapped at Christmas.
Getting Cruised In the Heights
Got my hair cut. Short. Shaved sides. Even got my eyebrows did.
Ghurl, my shit is looking correct.
I scraped my pennies together and indulged in some self-care. Hit up mi hombre, Hermán, at the barber shop in the Heights near my girl’s crib, and got a cut.
Ever since my best homegirl passed away, getting a haircut has been this saving grace, one I dive into whenever my reservoir of sanity is…
The “Book of Life” Gave Me My Anything More
The last words of my father’s eulogy were, “Live so that you can see him again.” It was a call to Christian salvation, as most Baptist eulogies are. It was also a marker of exclusion for those whose bodies had been coded with “ungodliness.” I am one of those. There was a woman in the back pew who had driven eight hours to exorcise my despair, to fill a hotel room with the name of our gods, to…
Original Illustrations by Lauren Walker
“Your head is like obsidian,” she says to you, her hand passing North and South and East and West smooth across the surface, erasing away smudges, blood stains (but not scars, no, not scars, never scars) and the exoskeletons of memories bashed against a windshield.
You recall all you learned from geology classes as she continues to stroke your head. The…
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: Or How I Divorced Jesus and Learned to Love Sex
I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride;
I have gathered my myrrh along with my balsam.
I have eaten my honeycomb and my honey;
I have drunk my milk and my wine.
– Song of Solomon 5:1I married my husband when I was 12 years old on a muggy summer night in the church where I grew up. My family had chosen him for me. We’d been introduced. He liked animals, magic tricks, and talking circles…
5 Weirdo Things I Saw While Driving Across America
In August and September, I drove 9000 miles around the United States. This is a big, bizarre place, with a lot of things you can really only see right where I saw them. They all tell their own stories about this weirdo country. Here are some of those things, from roadside attractions to monuments to the Cold War to an iconic warehouse past its prime.
The Mitchell Corn Palace, Mitchell, SD
Whe…
7.One of the earliest memories of my childhood is of competitively playing computer games against my brother. He was three, I was four, and our parents had a Macintosh Plus that lived in the basement office for Important Adult Business. On occasion, however, Mommy would let us play. It didn’t take long for me to become completely hooked. My game of choice was Stunt Copter— a single player 2D…
Because If I Was Honest, Everything I Knew Would Explode
October 1 marks the beginning of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which I have complicated feelings about. The numbers are frightening and important: one out of 10 teenagers are abused by someone they are dating. Domestic violence homicides claim the lives of three women every day. The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 was met with resistance, with politicians wanting to…
feature image via shutterstock.com
“In fact, the strain of hiding my illness would likely have caused me to break down with even more frequency. How would she have coped with those dysphoric, hallucination-ridden breakdowns — and how would I have dealt with her uneducated reactions?”
