Laurel’s Reviews > People Like Us > Status Update

“You can’t fix the world,” she says. “You can’t fix time. People like us, we feel it too much. We want to fix too much. And, sometimes, it just swallows us up.”

And it’ll happen again, to someone else, at another school, during another police stop, at another nightclub. And we’ll all get angry. And we’ll weep. And we’ll scream for change. And we’ll march. And we’ll protest. And we’ll move forward. And then we’ll get tired and take our foot off the gas and slide right back…Over and over again. It’s a type of time travel that all of us are all caught in.

Over a lifetime, if somebody was to pull out the abacus and add up all those little leaky trots, I bet there was miles to go before she slept.

The only weakness that ever gave her grief, over her whole life, was her bladder. As the legend goes when she explains the story, she was born with the smallest bladder in the history of human existence. “A pecan with cracks in it,” is how she described it to him on one of their first dates, back before their daughter ever came into the picture.

I knew a woman who sneezed every time she orgasmed. I’ve shook hands with a Black president and watched Fury Road in the same afternoon. Yeah, kid, I’m someone who’s seen rockets break orbit! When folks come around with that old sales pitch about how things always gotta come up snake eyes in the end, well, I just let it pass me by. Nothing in this life is duty-bound to fall apart. Nothing.

But I’ve seen the back side of hurricanes too. I’ve seen lots of things. I’ve seen birds fight off bears the northern lights dance a jig over the Tuscaloosa. Seen a man get tossed into the air by an eighteen-wheeler and walk off laughing. One time I seen an alpaca riding shotgun in a Toyota Camry in the middle of Atlanta. I’ve seen 40 yr-old bare breasts dangled out of a Burger King drive-thru window…

“I’m tired of standing out. I’m tired of having to be small so that I don’t make waves and I’m tired of having to scream at the top of my lungs just to keep the world from swallowing me up. It shouldn’t be both ways at the same time. It just shouldn’t!”

Fuck Democrats. Fuck Republicans. Fuck conservatives. Fuck liberals. Fuck the Supreme Court. Fuck the red, the white, and the goddamned blue. Fuck it all. I need air. And fuck anybody that wants me to stay in a place that does nothing but suffocate me. I have no home, when you get down to it. No nigga does. And we don’t need one.”

“It’s just quieter,” Not Toni Morrison adds. “I go outside and, hell, when I hear something that sounds like a gunshot I don’t duck under tables. I know it’s just a car backfiring.”

Hell, a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet. And a friend is a gift you give yourself.