Watch Us Rise(54)

Forever, I will see art as healing.

Something that cures & cushions,

reflects & revitalizes.

Mends & makes magic, always.

How you taught us to see the world & our place in it. Build together,

show up for each other, stay.

Learn who you are.

Know who you are.

Connect with who you love.

Forever, you are with us.

Scrutinizing sculptures, paintings,

mixed media, monologues & poems.

We stay studying our past,

the ancestors who came before.

You taught us what it means

to make what’s wrong—right. & just.

Your words permanently penned in our minds.

Have heart. Stand up. Be proud.



Jasmine spoke at the funeral too. She didn’t talk about her dad as a community organizer or his job at the Schomburg or the volunteer work he used to do at their church—making sure all the older folks were cared for and that they always had a Thanksgiving feast for their neighborhood. She just talked about how much she would miss Sunday mornings in the kitchen with him, listening to old-school R&B and gospel, making cheese grits and sausage gravy—a holdout from when he grew up Down South. She told everybody how much she would miss the kitchen table, his prayers, and the way he could always see right through to what she was thinking. She talked about how her family would share a peak and pit at the end of their day. And then she said, “Today, my pit is that my father has left this earth, but my peak is that everyone here has lifted him up. And to see you all is to feel and know—love.” I wrote it down in my journal when she said it, so she wouldn’t forget the feeling in church that day. It even made me feel a little more religious than I usually do. I’ve been saying more prayers lately, and although I’m not totally sure who I’m praying to, I like the process of talking my feelings out loud. It feels comfortable in a way it never has before.





For New Year’s Eve we all get together at my house. There’s a party happening at Word Up that we’d all planned to go to, and James’s parents are out of town, so he invited the whole class there too, but none of us really wanted to go out, so Isaac, Nadine, and Jasmine ended up piled on the bed and beanbags in my room. We’d gone to the bodega to get every possible food we’d need—two liters of Coke, Cheetos, dulce de leche and rocky road ice cream, tortilla chips and pineapple habanero salsa (which is my personal favorite), and a couple bags of candy that were on sale. Mom ordered pizza for us before she went to dinner with Dad, and Mia told us not to mess with any of her stuff but said we could borrow her Beats Pill so we could listen to anything we wanted. And then the apartment was all ours. This was pretty much my dream come true. To cheer Jasmine up, we made a playlist that included the following:

Mending a Broken Heart—Jasmine’s Playlist

1.“(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” —Jackie Wilson 2.“I Say a Little Prayer”—Aretha Franklin 3.“I’ll Be There”—The Jackson 5

4.“Through the Fire”—Chaka Khan 5.“The Best”—Tina Turner 6.“Up Where We Belong”—BeBe and CeCe Winans 7.“It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday”—Boyz II Men 8.“I Didn’t Know My Own Strength”—Whitney Houston 9.“Midnight Rider”—Willie Nelson 10.“Endless Love”—Lionel Richie and Diana Ross

It was pretty much the best playlist we’d ever created, and it included a bunch of songs that Jasmine’s dad used to love that we heard him play all the time. We pulled out a bunch of my scarves, hats, and jackets and started to lip sync and dance all around the apartment. Isaac stood up on our couch and belted out Willie Nelson’s “Midnight Rider” in a way that made us all wonder how many times he’d actually listened to the song to know every verse. And then Jasmine and Isaac did the BeBe and CeCe Winans duet, and basically I had to bite the inside of my cheek as hard as possible to stop myself from saying anything out loud—kiss her already, you idiot!

It was pretty awesome to be acting as wild as we were without any alcohol. I knew that at James’s house, everyone would be drunk at this point, or at least tipsy. But Nadine was allergic, and Jasmine and I didn’t really like the taste of it, and Isaac had one too many drinks at a party over the summer and threw up the whole night—so he was taking an indefinite break. This is how I know these are my people, though, the ones who you can dance around and act silly with—the ones who you can do shots of soda with and laugh until it comes out of your nose. They’re also the ones you can cry with.

By the end of the night, Jasmine is in tears. We huddle around her and tell her we’ll be there the whole way. We also all decide to write New Year’s resolutions.

“Make them with ‘I’ statements,” Nadine says. “You know, like . . . I resolve to . . . eat more spinach.”

“What?” Isaac asks.

“Start with ‘I resolve’—you know, make it from your point of view.”

“No, I get that, I just don’t understand why you’re resolving to eat more spinach.” Nadine punches Isaac in the arm, and we grab pens and paper.

Jasmine writes: I resolve to mourn. I resolve to heal. I resolve to love.

Nadine writes: Yes, I do resolve to eat more spinach, because I want to grow healthy and strong—in your face, Isaac. I resolve to practice guitar and get some new DJ gigs. I resolve to pass algebra. Please!