It was impossible to tell her grandma how complicated it all was. To sit on a couch next to Felix and want to reach for his hand one moment and then on the walk home think, It would be so easy to disappear tonight. To laugh so hard she cried when Jane told her about a night out at a drag king show. Then to decide in a quiet moment that she didn’t deserve to eat for the rest of the day. To stand in line with Stephen to buy limited-edition shoes that looked like beige sleeping bags and to listen to him talk about how your drip should be constantly evolving, and somehow, this, too, was so much fun but her own brain was whispering below it all, “You aren’t the one who should be here.” Her grandmother promised to bake cookies for all her friends. She was coming to a parents’ weekend in early January and expected all of them to take her out for lunch.

The only way for Ayanna to keep her brain quiet was to constantly be doing. So she threw herself into work. Extra credit, morning runs, and additional research for the faith-healer interview. Ayanna watched clips from a broadcast of At Home with Simone. The show was kitschy with all of Simone’s obsessions with diets, cashmere throws, and authors who were always lying to Simone even if it was just the simple repeated phrase I’m so happy to be here, and the way that Simone couldn’t stop bringing on dubious square-jawed medical professionals to cart around wheelbarrows of fat or tell people the secret to keeping away Alzheimer’s was to drink a smoothie made from celery, apple cider vinegar, and ground pink Szechuan peppercorns. But still, she couldn’t help but smile watching the opening credits, and how her parents had encouraged her to call the host “Aunt Simone.”

Ayanna remembered quickly why she had found Simone so interesting. Some of it was the musicality of her voice, the high and low notes that made even a cursory “Folks, it is a Tuesday afternoon” beautiful. But in her long opening discussion, during which Simone looked at the camera, it still felt radical to see someone be so Black on TV. From talking about a news article that suggested baby powder and hair straightening might be contributing to higher than average cancer rates in Black women to the ways that winter Tuesdays always felt like a new innovation in misery—and you could hear the relish she took in making the o in innovation long and theatrical—and then to a long story about taking her mom to the church, and her mom was so old now, she was clapping on the ones and threes.