Love letter to the me who had to learn how to leave.
I took this photo of myself, mid-cry, in a back room of a restaurant I worked at, on my last night, after I decided to leave, after another of the same sort of fight I’m tired of writing about. I will not write about it again here. I don’t know if that’s progress or just getting tired; if it’s a step up out of the grave or one down into it. Anyway It gets confusing when the same motion could both save you and kill you.
I’m not sure why I took the picture. At the time I felt silly; still I did it. Sometimes I think we feel this primal need: to prove we were here. To leave artifacts of ourselves, of the places we bled. That a moment existed before they bleached out our screams. All the deaths that we died. Maybe this picture is an altar, frozen in time, suspended amongst 8,000 some-odd other photos on my phone and impossible to find unless I really looked. Unless I really chose to believe myself, the person from that moment. Chose to give myself a witness other than the broken camera lens.
I come from people who carry not being believed like a chromosomal defect. It often feels like less an experience we had than one we are. Sometimes I feel crazy and small and singular; later I listen to two Black queer podcasters talk about reconciling the death of Chadwick Boseman with the life of Donald Trump; of voting for Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump; and I understand again. How none of it is on accident. How all the pieces fold into each other. The broken puzzle that all the not being believed bits make up. What it is to be mapped onto that splintered landscape.
It makes me feel a little saner if just as far from being whole.
I don’t know if people think it’s noble to live as I have; write as I do; break as I seem to continue doing, in the same areas but in new patterns. I’m sure to some it seems dramatic, martyr-ish; to others, like I never got the therapy I needed. Or maybe those are just all the things I tell myself.
Things don’t move in a linear fashion, for as much as Western whiteness and its capitalism try to say otherwise.
I do know that over the years you get tired of yourself. How you cry the same tears, live the same wars, fight the same fights wearing different names; different faces; different jobs; different cities.
How you never learned.
Pressure busts pipes, and energy breaks what’s not built to hold it. Pain is no less an energy than any other. Thirty-one years into a life within systems you’ve stopped believing will change, you wonder: why can’t I? Why haven’t I? Why am I still like this?
You tell yourself the same list of cruel things, and some of them will be true, and some of them will be true words filtered through the broken pieces of your heart. You are, after all, your mother’s daughter. You can change the name she gave you and move 500 miles away, but your first language will always be one of bent light and shadows. And don’t they always know it. And don’t you always let them.
You are still that 19-year-old girl who never learned how to feel safe. And well, how do you build the architecture of a home you’ve never seen?
I’m trying. Lord knows I’m trying. I’m trying to see the blueprint of a home with room enough to believe us. To hold all of us. A place whose bones that wouldn’t break. Where there wouldn’t be any selfies like this because we’d have so much better than a tiny snapshot amidst 8,000 photos on a cracked iPhone.
Sometimes, I’m just not sure I can get there.
