Who are you the morning after the most beautiful man you have ever kissed tries to kill you? And the morning after that? How about the following week? - Saeed Jones

Just as some cultures have a hundred words for “snow,” there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night.

A joke I used to repeat in those days was: Why be happy when you can be interesting? I knew how to be interesting. There was power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting: sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machine-gun rounds, a drink in one hand, a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room could orbit around you.

My mother's body wouldn't recover so much as bide its time against her heart's inevitable betrayal.