They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

The real grief is silence in a place where there was once noise.

The truth is, if we don’t write our own stories, there is someone else waiting to do it for us. And those people, waiting with their pens, often don’t look like we do and don’t have our best interests in mind.

We are not done burying our heroes before we are asked to bury our friends. Our mourning is eclipsed by a greater mourning. I know nothing that will get us through this beyond whatever small pockets of happiness we make for each other in between the rage and the eulogies and the marching and the protesting and the demanding to be seen and accounted for.

Joy, in these moments, is the sweetest meal that we keep chasing the perfect recipe for, among a world trying to gather all of the ingredients for itself.

What often doesn’t get talked about with real and deep heartbreak after a romantic relationship falls apart is that it isn’t always just a single moment. It’s an accumulation of moments, sometimes spread out over years. It is more than just the person you love leaving; it’s also seeing them happy after they’ve left, seeing them beginning to love someone else, seeing them build a life that you perhaps hoped to build with them.

I guess, when you work so hard to dodge the long arms of grief, it is impossible to allow all of grief’s stages to move through you.

It is misery as I have most frequently seen black men experiencing their misery, not discussed, pushed into a lens of what will drown it out with the most ferocity

It didn’t take rappers long to realize that their particular brand of storytelling wasn’t the type that could gain sympathy or understanding from white people in power, so why not play into the inevitable fear

more the idea that his understanding of cadence, tone, and crowd control always felt rooted in rap music, which is rooted in a black oral tradition. People telling stories around porches, and then to instruments, and then to beats

The optics of equality, though not doing the same work as actual measures of equality, mean something. Particularly to any people who have been denied access or visibility, or any people who were made to feel like the work they created was not worthy of equal consideration in the eyes of the country it was created in.