If I Survive You

He’s never seen men so content as when they have to abandon the menial tasks put on them by their nine-to-fives to come home and board up their houses, to leave what does not matter to protect what does.

Every boy deserves to believe him father is good, but if each father were good, we’d be living in a different kind of world.

remembered high school like I remembered dreams, in waves, with little recall for faces or what they should have meant to me.

Tell him-across the expanse of time and distance, as I am telling you now— all that I can't say to him. Start with the resentment and the feelings of neglect and your resulting recklessness. Recount every injury, every scar you carved into each other. And when you're finished, and you are certain your father has heard, do what might divert you from the path to self-destruction: forgive yourselves.

You assume that, should you survive long enough to become a grandfather or great-grandfather, you will outlive winter; you will outlive glaciers and polar bears and snow. And it occurs to you now that, should you survive to see your progeny reproduce, you will outlive and thus need to explain Miami to these descendants—who in your mind's eye split your features and Jelly's—as the city, by then, like much of Port Royal and Atlantis before it, will have returned to the sea.

She says she can finally breathe now. She feels freed by the privilege of relative racelessness. In 2009, Kingston's murder rate reached the highest ever on record, and my mom returned there so she could finally feel safe.

I imagined I could have begged an old girlfriend from college to send money; enough of them had expressed ambivalence about their trust funds that this seemed a plausible path down which I might drag myself away from homelessness. But I’d sooner have hanged myself.

It sounds like you'd prefer if people treated you less like a generalization and more like a human being. Like how White people treat White people." She bites her lip cautiously, then says, "Right." "And your outward appearance is the only thing preventing this from becoming a reality." "Exactly!" she says. "I know what you're feeling," you say. "And I don't think it's Whiteness.

For a moment, I consider texting my brother to see if his offer to move in with him—now that his wife up and left—still stands. His invitation had arrived with brotherly advice: People amount to their actions and you’ve been acting like a bum. I took no offense but clarified, I identify as dispossessed.

Why don't stars make any sounds in the winter? What sounds? Ethan said.

What does Whiteness feel like?... I imagine it's like walking barefoot…