Excerpt

Now that I had actually done it, I wondered what death would be like. I didn't really want to die. Not really. I just wanted the pain to stop. Twenty-four years was long enough for any one person to inhale the exhilaration of hope and exhale the devastation of despair. I decided that life wasn't fair for those of us who were predominantly innocent. After all, if you took the time to analyze the big picture, you would see that the only crime I had ever really committed was that I had been conceived and had the audacity to be born without the benefit of something as overrated as holy matrimony. Was being born a bastard truly enough evidence to justify a life sentence without parole? Life was incredibly exhausting. Even if death turns out to be worse, I thought, at least it’ll be a change of scenery.

I’ve never been much on patience. I was even born six weeks before I was supposed to be. Needless to say, I was one sick baby. In fact, I was so sick they told Mama I probably wouldn't make it. But just like she always had, I survived, too. Fortunately---or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it---my only lasting birth defect was that the delicate chambers of my heart were too small to comfortably accommodate the emptiness that kept forcing its way in. It was a familiar feeling, the emptiness was. Unaware that I had given it permission, it made itself right at home in important places like my heart and my stomach and my throat. I had grown just as accustomed to it as I had to the mole on the left side of my mouth that seemed to wink when I smiled.

My only real source of comfort over the years had been my journal. Little black girls in the Deep South didn't typically keep journals, but I had kept one since I was eight years old. My father had given it to me, though he didn't call it that at the time. I wrote in it whenever I felt extremely happy or extremely sad or extremely confused. The particular feeling really didn't matter too much. The only necessity for gaining entry into my journal was that it be extreme. Kind of like Antarctica in the dead of winter or water in a teapot on the verge of boiling over. That tiny, unpretentious journal was one of my most valued possessions and I cherished it long after the pages had been used up and the light illuminating my father’s memory had dimmed.

My eyes began to well up as I remembered the powder blue book with the little white princess on the front cover. This time the emptiness had decided to wedge its way into the small, circular space behind my eye sockets where I kept all of my tears safely stored away. I hated when it went there because it felt like somebody was throwing darts in the corridors of my brain and my head always hurt for hours afterwards. It didn't really matter where the emptiness went this time, though, because soon, I wouldn't feel anything at all.

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