"How does one shake off desire? To give it a voice is to sow a seed, knowing that to admit and submit to something which is on the outer limits of your understanding."
"Under what conditions does unconditional love become no more? The answer is you will never not cry for your father. You don’t always like those you love unconditionally. Language fails us, always."
"You wanted to put a ball through a hoop, and repeat. You didn’t want to have to think about what it meant to wander the unending acres of the grounds, the series of coincidences and conditions which confirmed your place there, loud in the silence. You didn’t want to have to think about what was seen when you offered a grin in the arena. "
We are all hurting, you said. We are all trying to live, to breathe, and find ourselves stopped by that which is out of our control. We find ourselves unseen. We find ourselves unheard. We find ourselves mislabelled. We who are loud and angry, we who are bold and brash. We who are Black. We find ourselves not saying it how it is. We find ourselves scared. We find ourselves suppressed, you said. But do not worry about what has come before, or what will come, move.
"Under what conditions does the uncontainable stay contained? Things unsaid don’t often remain so. They take shape and form in ways one doesn’t expect, manifesting in touches, glances, gazes, sighs. All you have wanted to do was hold each other in the darkness. Now, you have opened the box and left it unguarded in the night. You have both placed faith in the other that you will wake up intact. You have acted on a feeling. You are in a memory of the present. You are tumbling through a fever dream, surfacing only to plunge once more."
"To be you is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression. That suppression is indiscriminate. That suppression knows not when it will spill.
What you’re trying to say is that it’s easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than emerge cloaked in your own vulnerability. Not better, but easier. However, the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate.
At some point, you must breathe."
"It’s one thing to be looked at, and another to be seen; you’re scared that she might not just see your beauty, but your ugly too."
