I paint with words, but this week I ran out. My easel is dry, brushes stiff, canvases empty. I’m a shell of myself, and I can’t seem to grab onto anything long enough to shake this feeling. I try to make it a point to show people they matter through my actions. This week I actually felt like I didn’t. My life felt worthless for enough time that I dignified it with some attention. Everything I’ve done up until this point could be voided. All the work, the ideas, the unspoken sentences, cutoff, because someone else’s fear can leave them empowered to take my life and the discourse that follows would require my family to defend my character, using the same things that make me “non-threatening” to begin with. I wasn’t rocked by the videos. My spirit was eviscerated and my mind is struggling to piece together what to do next.
Everything smells like death, and it feels like I’m one traffic stop away from a funeral.
My text threads bring tears to my eyes and put knots in my stomach. It’s a mixture of praying hands, hearts, stars and reminders to “Please, take care of yourself. I can’t lose you. Be safe. Your life is precious. You have your whole life ahead of you.” That’s what Philando Castile and Alton Sterling had, and what I imagine they wanted for their children and families. People want facts. These children want their fathers, but that’s not possible anymore.
Business as usual is impossible this week, unless that business is death.
It’s raining blood, and we are yet again being asked to collectively mop the streets of a place we built but can’t seem to find a home inside of. We are more than our ability to endure pain and remain seemingly unbreakable in the face of our consistent abasement.
Rest is home.
It says ‘you’re safe here.’ It is hugs from our mothers, smiles from our fathers, kisses from the nieces and wisdom from our grandparents. Dominos with our uncles. It is hearty laughter, deep and guttural that rings like a four-part harmony, inviting others to join. It is wet, sloppy kisses from the people who saw you grow up, and even if you forget them, they prayed you would never forget where you came from. Zora told us that “Black love is black wealth,” but it’s hard to see any gains when our hearts are constantly broken and there’s nothing left to give because they already took everything. Our successes are lauded, our deaths are recorded, our pain is indexed, and our healing, however long it takes, is used to justify the cycle. Things didn’t get better, we just found new ways to cope, but we’re one tragedy away from going right back to the thing that broke us in half.
Silence is war.
It attacks all your senses with efficiency and impunity. You don’t just hear it, you feel it. It’s in the quiet coughs and throat clearings to provide distance between you and any mention of racial injustice. Names get bundled together as simply tragedies and individual instance of misconduct; death is easier when it isn’t personal. It uses discomfort as a means to opt-out of conversations that are costing people their lives and leaving generational holes that can’t be sewed together. It assumes fear is created equal, and the person with the weapon has a right to enact theirs on my body and my ability to listen and do exactly what they want when they want, will somehow keep me alive. It means that you can get lynched publicly and the character of the perpetrator occupies more importance than the life of the slain. It is conditionally active; it can’t imagine I possess the fortitude to march for freedom in Oakland and mourn for what happened in Dallas, simultaneously.
Silence has another tactical consequence that’s equally as heinous; it can take your appetite for life and subjugate you if you aren’t careful. Respectability is an insidious virus that starts off as simply “learning how to navigate” different worlds we enter. Left unchecked, it quickly turns you into the safest version of yourself, ensuring your personhood exists to benefit other people’s comfort and never your own.. You can crush your own spirit without anyone’s help and discover you did so, much later. You know you have a voice, but you discover you haven’t used it in so long you forgot it existed and the many places it can help.
I am often only without words at times of unspeakable pain or unbearable joy in my life.
This week has given me more of the former than I can fully articulate. My soul needs rest and my heart cries for justice, simultaneously. It is worth searching, pursuing and participating in the acquisition of both.
As I fight more tears, I’ll keep looking, because I don’t want my life to end like an ellipsis before I’ve finished my statement.
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