*}Precious role play{*

The apartment my mother lives in still smells the same — cigarettes and something fried, the TV always too loud, like silence is the enemy. I go back some Sundays because that’s what you do, I guess. You go back. Even when going back feels like stepping into water you already know is cold.

“You think you better than me now,” she says, not even looking up from the screen. “Going to your little classes. Talking all proper.”

I don’t say nothing. I learned a long time ago that some fights ain’t worth having, because she don’t fight to win, she fights to keep you small. I used to think her voice was the loudest thing in my life. Now I know it’s just the oldest. I got my GED last spring.

Took me two tries on the math section, which still makes me laugh a little, because numbers were always the one thing that made sense to me, the one place nobody could lie to me or about me. Two plus two don’t care what your daddy did. Two plus two

don’t care what your mama say about your body, your face, your worth. Numbers just sit there being true.

Abdul is four now. Mongo’s seven, living with my mother’s cousin out in Yonkers because of — because of the way she is, the way Mongo is, and there are things Mongo needs that I’m still learning how to give her,

things I’m fighting the system every week to understand. Abdul’s smart. Too smart, the teacher says, like that’s a problem and not a miracle.

I work mornings at a daycare now, watching other people’s babies, which is a strange kind of grace, getting paid to be gentle with children when nobody was ever required to be gentle with me. I’m careful with them. I get down on the floor with them.

I let them see my face when I’m proud of something they did, because for sixteen years I waited for somebody’s face to do that for me and it almost never came.

The caseworker — not Ms. Weiss no more, a new one, younger, tired-looking in a way that tells me she still cares, just ain’t learned yet how to protect herself from caring too much — she says the judge wants to see “stability.” Wants to see income,

wants to see a lease with my name on it, wants to see I ain’t using, wants to see Abdul in school regular and Mongo getting her services. She says my mother showing up at the hearing talking about how I owe her, how she “the one who really raised those babies,”

could hurt me. I told her: she didn’t raise nobody. She survived me being born and called that raising. At night, after Abdul’s asleep, I write. Not poems exactly, not the way Ms. Rain taught us, with the line breaks

and all that, but close to it. I write the truth down because the truth got nowhere else to live if I don’t give it a home. I write: I am not what happened to me. I write it again because sometimes once ain’t enough to believe a thing.

My mother calls on a Tuesday, says she’s sick, says come sit with her, and some old voice in me — the voice that’s twelve years old and starving for one decent word from her — wants to go. But I think about

Abdul’s face when I pick him up, the way he runs at me like I’m the safest place in the world, and I think: I cannot teach that boy what safe means if I keep handing my own self over to the one place I never was safe.