Hold Love Strong Read Free Page B

Ever, brothers and sisters were fish and dying was the H, the 2, and the O of our lives. So what did we do? We did what anyone would do. We breathed in dying and lived in dying as if dying and the baggage that came with dying were normal, like everywhere in the world mama stole from grandma and sold her pussy in the stairwell to get high.
    III
    I was a statue, the type of infant whose stoic, tearless nature and irrevocable insomnia led my family to believe I was afflicted. I could be knocked down, dropped, shaken like a bottle of soda, even forgotten for hours at a time, yet still I would not burst, cry out, whimper; still I would not look upon the world with anything less than a wide, exacting stare. Over the course of the first two years of my life, all kinds of ailments, retardations, and deficiencies were prefaced with maybe and assigned to me. Maybe I was deaf. Maybe I was mute. Maybe too much water surrounded my brain. I didn’t get enough air. I was blind, lacking the sense of touch. I was autistic, dyslexic, unable to make the connection between need and action, emotion and thought, heart and mind. When put down, when brought to the floor, when seated on the bus, when planted on a lap, I grew roots; I stayed. When put to bed, I lay on my back, my brown eyes round, unblinking, doll-like. When lifted and carried, I leaned back, made myself a weight greater than I actually was, pushed away from my embracer as if determined to attain a particular distance, freedom, a space that gave meenough room to look around, lay my eyes upon the people and environment enveloping, studying, tickling, prodding, and fussing over me.
    When she was not doting over her newest truest true love, when she was not chasing after or being chased, flirting or playing coy, my Aunt Rhonda teased me, poked my belly, picked me up to sit me down again so she could study my stillness and have a laugh. When he was not playing basketball with friends, practicing his shooting form in the bathroom mirror, or dribbling a ball in the apartment, the hallway, on the roof, or up and down the stairs, my Uncle Roosevelt utilized me like an inanimate object. I was the stone he used to prop open a door, the broom he used to sweep the kitchen floor, a table he tried to balance things on, a shotgun he tucked under his arm, cocked and aimed. The doctors at the clinic had no time for me. I looked healthy, they said. My stool was normal. I didn’t have a fever. Take him home, they said. My mother fretted over my lethargy, my aloofness, the distance I seemed predetermined to attain. She feared she did something to damage me during her pregnancy and her fear was so great she was positive she must have. Perhaps it was the cigarettes she’d smoked, the pulls from a joint. Perhaps it was her youth, that because she’d only menstruated a handful of times prior to my conception and without any semblance of regularity, I was damaged. Maybe she’d run around too much, chased, teased, laughed, and sobbed. Maybe she talked on the phone too loud. Maybe she watched too much TV. Maybe the various manifestations of her physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual immaturity pervaded me, infected me with the particulars of my nature.
    My grandmother told her not to worry. She shrugged off all fears and doubts. She said I was Job; Jonah in the belly of the whale; Noah in his ark; Moses in the desert. It was my great patience that would help me overcome everything the world, this life, gave me.
    Of course, my mother didn’t believe her. She couldn’t. She didn’t have the capability. She was a teenager. How she felt, not facts or biblical stories, burned inside of her, mingled with her desire to dance and flirt and thefantasy that there was a brother who was her prince, who would soon arrive, ride into Ever on his horse, his magic carpet, in a car, a boat, a plane, and whisk her away, take us to a land where she was queen.
    Yet, because she was the only