AC had been broken all summer. A breeze drifted into the car, then slipped away as if it knew to leave us alone. - Saeed Jones

People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The “I” it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, “I am no longer yours.” My grandmother and I, without knowing it, were faithfully following a script that had already been written for us. A woman raises a boy into a man, loving him so intensely that her commitment finally repulses him.

People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The “I” it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, “I am no longer yours.

After having put so many years and miles between the scared little boy and the young man I had fought so hard to become, here I was again: alone in the crowd, the black kid trembling in the middle of a graveyard only he could perceive.