But maybe it’s not that we’re neglectful, like the story suggests, but rather that we invest too much, try too hard, when it comes to the values and ideals that matter most to us, we’re acutely aware of our own frailties, of when things aren’t quite how they should be, or how we’d like them to be, or how we always dreamt they would be. Maybe we fail, because we care.
Still, there were disturbing signs that something was just not right in my world. I remember in high school, I would study for, take tests, and get them back without remembering anything about them. I missed entire classes, only to find detailed notes for them in my notebooks.
We waited three weeks for the pathology report that confirmed my feeling that she was a girl and left us with no answers about why she died. We received her ashes a few days later.
My husband and two children throw kisses, a lifejacket that the waves toss out of reach. My family calls again, insistent that I return to them. My puckered hands are needed; it’s close to bedtime, that’s-life. For now, for them, I acquiesce.
My marriage does not save me from anything, but it does allow me certain safeguards, and it does let kids and teenagers know that they can dream about their wedding, if that is what they want, they can have kids, that one day their life will get better. That they are not perverts, that they are loved, that they are normal.
I am here and they are there and I can’t help that now. But what I can do is listen to friends a little harder, ask questions a little more deeply and see people a little more clearly. All I can do is look for these people everywhere while they’re still here.
After months of eating almost nothing at all, now I was binging on every carb in sight. I refused to leave the house, preferring to sit on my bed and stare. It didn’t feel like I was crying, yet weak tears continually leaked down my cheeks so slowly they were cold by the time they touched my skin.
The progression was as imperceptible as the curve of the earth reaching out toward an obscured horizon. The parade of small losses in accumulation are enough to compress my chest with a weighty grief, yet taken one by one, they were somehow manageable. They nearly passed without remark. Dementia was something of a pickpocket; it stole while my attention was elsewhere.
As I waited for him, I leaned my forehead against the searing glass, glorious sweat beading at my hairline. I wanted to cook from the inside out, to be cleansed by fire and retreat like molten lava. I prayed that pharmacy line would take forever. Maybe I would burn. Maybe I would rise again like a phoenix.
The ants play death with me as they find their way into my bra, biting my tits for escape. Their only solace is to escape breathing as I smash them furiously and call them mother-fuckers for biting my beautiful fleshy orbs of life. I’ve tasted the bitter death of more than 10 of these tiny soldiers as I blindly put the rim of the glass to my mouth and drink naively. It doesn’t take much to smash their tiny bodies between the tongue and bumpy roof of the mouth.
The door opened to a room of perfect sadness. There was a twin bed, covered with a Disney quilt. A series of pictures on the wall: ducks flying. MADISON’S ROOM read the appliqué letters above the bed. There was a small bookshelf and a larger desk, covered with a mess of pens and markers.
The most valuable thing about interracial marriage for our larger society is not that it is, in itself, the key to ending racism and white privilege, but rather that interracial couples come face to face, more than couples of the same race, with our deepest assumptions and biases on a daily basis. My marriage is a bubbling cauldron of identity politics, and maybe that’s not a bad thing.
