WORDS

Discovering Dangerfield

Sharon Gaddis, a black woman, married Tom Wheeler, a white man in 1977, 10 years after interracial marriage was legalized nationwide. One year later, they gave birth to me.

They raised me two doors down from my mom’s parents in suburban Los Angeles. Even though this immediate family of mine was mostly black, I don’t recall any of my childhood friends assigning me any particular race. Los Angeles is awash with ethnically diverse faces, I blend right in. Whenever I did catch someone staring at me, I assumed it was because I’m just so lovely to look at (such a libra), not because the onlooker was trying to unravel the mysterious spectrum of my family. 

 -Read more at The Nasiona


Everything Is Beautiful And Everything Is Terrible


My mother’s eyes are bulging, glassy and wild, almost spinning in their sockets with fear. Her cracked lips are pulled back from her teeth, which snap viciously. She is warning an invisible opponent of her bite. Her face is waxy and becomes more and more gray as the blood drains from her hollow cheeks. This is the violent final showdown between my mother and her leukemia, and at this moment, though I stand beside her, she is facing death alone, terrified and tortured by the blood that runs in both of our veins.

My heart bashes unevenly against my chest as I watch my mother die her excruciating death. She’s looking at me, but she doesn’t see me. From the hospital room, I text my husband, “I will have nightmares about this day for the rest of life.” He texts me back and my text tone, the sound of a clown horn comically honking over and over again, fills the void left by my mother’s silent screams.

Fwee-HAWNK Fwee-HAWNK Fwee-HAWNK

-Read More on Midnight and Indigo


SHAME


My dad and I bond hard over the Harry Potter fandom and just as my sister and I began to notice the post-pubescent hotness of Ron, Harry, Draco, and the rest, so did our big homo dad. My dad was never a creep about it, he’s just gay, so when he sees an attractive grown man, sometimes he says things like, “Hey, that is an attractive grown man.”

It was my father who sent me the jpeg of Harry Potter naked, leaning sensually against a white horse. I like to think lots of daughters received emails with the same risque email attachment from their mothers in 2008, but maybe I was a minority in getting that message from a father.  He howled when I told him that I’d made the image the screensaver on my laptop.

  - Read More on Medium

Wild AF Personal Essays/Cannabis Reviews from AProperHigh.com











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