—I WAS FAR TOO SCARED TO HIT HIM, BUT I WOULD HIT HIM IN A HEARTBEAT NOW

 

 

Another Brooklyn—Jacqueline Woodson

 

--I know that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It’s the memory.

 

--Where would we be now if we had known there was a melody to our madness?

 

--Who hasn’t walked through a life of small tragedies?

 

--…the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying Here. Help me carry this.

 

--No judgement is a lie.

 

--Maybe she had already forgotten, the way years allow us to.

 

--And as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home.

 

--Whenever a good song came on, she swayed like waves being poured.

 

--She was sloe-eyed and wide-mouthed, a beauty that could have just as easily not been so.

 

--Maybe this was how it happened first for everyone—adults promising us their own failed futures.

 

--When boys called our names we said, Don’t even say my name. Don’t even put it in your mouth.

 

--Death didn’t frighten me. Not now. Not anymore. But Brooklyn felt like a stone in my throat.

 

--And she whispered how she was the queen of other places.

 

--When she showed up again, I’d introduce my friends to her. I’d say: You were wrong Mama. Look at us hugging. Look at us laughing. Look how we begin and end each other.

 

--One day my body would tell the world stories beneath the fabric of my clothes.

 

--And everywhere I looked, I saw glass shattering into truth.

 

--Who could understand how terrifying and perfect it was to be kissed by a teenage boy?

 

--I was fourteen and nothing mattered but hearing I love you and believing he meant it.

 

--When you’re fifteen, pain skips over reason, aims straight for the marrow.

 

--Once I came very close to saying, For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead. But I didn’t.

 

--This earth is seventy percent water. Hard not to walk into it.

 

--Two steps to the left or right or back or front and you’re standing outside your life.