I don’t want to write about something happy. I never have. Happiness is boring and old and doesn’t exist. I give you this moment: my grandmother, my two aunts— missing— and my mother, a bystander. It was one of those nights when snow covered the ground like a heavy, suffocating blanket, and my aunts, Gail and Glori, had gone to a friend’s house and hadn’t come back yet. It was getting dark, and my grandmother was nearly frantic, waiting impatiently like a mother bird rethinking the swift push out of the nest, like a woman waiting for something bad to happen. Finally, she stopped, zipped my mother— eleven or twelve then— into a big winter coat, and took her out to search the neighborhood. They lived in Co-Op City, where all of the buildings looked the same, but everyone you knew was right there in front of you like the palms of your hands. They searched, climbed to rooftops, walked and walked, then eventually returned home with no baby birds. They waited. That’s when she saw them, just out the window, two little dots waddling towards home. Two birds who had returned to the nest.

When my mother tells me this story, she doesn’t cry. I ask her what her happiest memory with her mother is and she says she doesn’t have one. That is the only memory, she says, that is a good one. She was so sick and she still went searching for her daughters. She loved them that much. This is the only good story she has. Stories of a mother losing her mind, and then her life. Stories of a girl learning motherhood for the wrong reasons. My grandmother took her own life when my mom was but thirteen, and I’ve heard these stories slow, like yarn unraveling. I sometimes wonder how my mother does not unravel with them. The stories are always too sad to fathom. I watch them like a movie I didn’t know would be so devastating but still can’t cry to. It’s so far away and so cinematic for the wrong reasons. I’m sorry, mom. I didn’t mean to misunderstand. I didn’t mean to take it the wrong way, but the only death I know is passing. The only death I know is it was their time.

My mother was a mother before me but to her sisters and brother and sometimes her father. My mother loved her family so hard and now they treat her like a mother they never wanted but still go to when they have nightmares and can’t sleep. It’s a tough game sometimes, and there are never any winners that matter. I don’t want our trauma to be the reason this story is good. I want this story to be good despite the trauma.

***

People want love to fix them but it never can. I want love to fix me and I haven’t given up and that is the problem.

Black love is hard and torturous and it hurts every time. Being Black and loving is an oxymoron because you are the moron. I don’t love my country and I don’t love myself most of the time. I love everyone around me but I’m so afraid that they don’t love me, so my heart hurts exponentially the more I think about needing anyone or anything. I’m afraid of too many things, and it doesn’t feel normal, and I’m sorry. This is about love. This about Black love and how fatal it is. I’m scared of love because it means I’m alive and if I’m alive then I can die. If I’m alive, then the police can kill me, or my heartbreak can kill me, or even I can kill me— and that’s the scariest of all.

When I got pulled over last year, I didn’t think I would die. I thought I’d be fine and maybe scared, but I was almost more afraid of what my mother would say than I was of the officer. He was nice to me. He told me to go to the courthouse and that they’d take the points off my license if I explained why I had been going so fast. After that night, I would see blue and red flashes of light in my rearview even when there were none, and I was haunted for weeks, maybe months. I hadn’t ever thought of myself as a Black person who could die that way. I had always cried for the fallen because they were my own people, but not because I was afraid. I had always been angry that there was no justice for these brown boys because our skin was the same, not because I feared my own lack of justice. But now I knew it was something that no one was exempt from. Now, the example I used in arguments was real, tangible, and so was I. I am more afraid of police right now than ever, and I feel like a fake but also I don’t. I’m sorry it feels like I’m ranting but I always want to cry and I know exactly why I’m sad. I’m tired of explaining myself to people and I’m tired of wanting more to life but being afraid to ask. I’m tired of feeling like every hour is just counting down to the last one, and I’m tired of that being both a deadline and a reminder that I will be dead soon.

​

It’s hard to ask 80% of the people you know why they think you’re wrong about your own skin, your own race, your own situation. It’s hard to ask people why they won’t believe me when I say I’m scared. We’re in peril. We’re suffering and no one is paying attention. All of High School was like this for me, and it will not stop and that’s what scares me.

In my Senior exit essay, I had said something about mourning my high school, or who they were supposed to be. Being there since I was 5 years old, I basically lived at The Park School of Baltimore, and they had taught me for so long that I was not Black or brown or girl but I was a student: a child— a brilliant child who could do anything. They lied. Everyone lies to me and it must stop. It has to stop.

Often, the world tells us we’re crazy— that we aren’t seeing things clearly, and that they are with us, they will help us fight for our freedom, just as long as they get freedom first. I have been erased so many times that sometimes, I can’t see myself when I look in the mirror. My favorite high school teacher once said, “sometimes I wonder how we haven’t gone crazy yet,” and this is to say that we have. I have. The reason I write is not just to have a voice, but to speak in a way that someone can’t deny. I have been denied for so long— we all have— and I don’t know whether to fight it or give up. Black people have been too forgotten too often. We’ve been given up on. I’ve wanted to give up so often, but I’m too afraid to. I am Black in America and that is fatal so why even try? Why love if I am already dead? Why live if all I am made to do is perish? Get pulled over and maybe, probably, die?

***

My parents got divorced in 2005, and for a while, I didn’t see it. The hate. The struggle. It appeared to me the way a child learns to read: first letters, then words, then magic treehouse, then suddenly, chapter books. I would like to say that I want my parents to rise above, but I’m not sure I could say something that feels so terribly conceited. Black love is hard and Black pain is hard, and it carries through families like plague. Their pain is not easily bypassed, and the world doesn’t let up. There’s always too much: sexism, prejudice, troubles in love, betrayal, familial tragedy, and then this world says let’s start killing your kind. We try and try to be better than our pain, but the world helps it beat us down. What else can you do? What else can any of us do? This is a real question; I want an answer. I am lost in a world with so many signs. Like they aren’t in a language I can understand, but I know where they’re pointing, and I have that feeling at the back of my neck that tells me something is wrong. It’s like that but always. Perpetually. 

Must I have to fight everyone I love? Must everyone love me the wrong way? Can’t anyone just believe me when I say I can’t breathe? Or must you first check my lungs to see if they still work? I’m sorry you aren’t comfortable. I’m sorry you don’t believe me, but that doesn’t mean I’m not right— just that you haven’t learned yet. You can’t fully love me if I’m not all there. I know love is hard and doesn’t start or end conveniently, but neither do our lives, so what do I do now? Is love another thing we aren’t allowed?

***

And how do I love? I have tried, I think, and I am never satisfied with how it feels in my chest. I have to forget myself, and when I remember, the love pounds, fast and hard in my chest, never letting up. I want to love someone without the chance of dying by accident then never getting the right justice, and that is how Blackness must function here and that is unfair. Say something. Please, say something. I am tired. I need a break, but a break is just what I cannot afford. I’m sorry this story is taking so long. I’m not sure how to explain it. I’m scared. I’m scared.

I wish love was easier but it’s not, and I’m Black and that's a tragedy too and when does it end? Black love is hard. Loving while Black is like trying to save a dying baby bird with just your hands. There’s not enough to save us, and love is not the right tool unless we know what to do with it. Sometimes, you get lucky, but sometimes— most times— you end up in mourning.

Black love is hard. I’ve said it too many times already, but I don’t think you’ve gotten it yet. I don’t want to love anyone too much because I might devastate them when I die, or worse I will not and they will move on and what does that mean for Black lives? I don’t want to love anyone too much because I am so close to death already, that if they say some shit like, but what about All Lives, I won’t survive it. I almost haven’t survived it in the past. The problem with so much Black love is that we can’t see through the heartbreak. It’s that: we have so much hurt that we neglect the ones we love.

***

I’m sorry I care more about my safety than everyone else's. I’m sorry I write poetry instead of going to protests, and I’m sorry I look down at house parties so I don’t have to look them in the eye when they say the N-word in the rap song. I’m sorry I’m so broken that I’m already tired of fighting.

For the last two years of high school, I fought non-stop. There was a boy, let's call him Charlie, who was white, in nearly all of my classes, and so smart, who, even at the end, demanded an answer. We were very liberal at my school, so there was no question about Trump, or All Lives, or even your political affiliations. I even know someone who “came out” as Republican. We were wrong. We equated Republican values with stupidity, incorrectness, bigotry. We should not have. We equated voting Republican in 2016 with stupidity, incorrectness, bigotry, and we should have. I fought with this boy, about the state of the world, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, mathematics, and most things he said in history class. I fought relentlessly. I was sure, positive, that if I fought hard enough, he would have a revelation. I was convinced that one day he’d understand me and it would make a difference. He never did. I wasted 2 years telling him my life was worth something and it did nothing and I’m disappointed in myself for trying now and that’s not fair. He took the fight from me.

My parents both suffered, and their parents suffered, and theirs. We are all suffering, and sometimes, we think we’re the only ones, or that we can just take a break and suffer alone, but we can’t because there is work to be done, and there are people to save, and we can be sad, but we can’t stand still. Not ever.

***

I’m going to keep fighting, but I’m still scared. I’m still human, you must know. I’m still afraid of red and blue lights, and I still want to give up sometimes— most times— but I think I know now that I’m only afraid of letting pain become the only thing that matters. It will not. I’m afraid of being someone who allows pain to be my main concern. I don’t want to be in pain but I don’t want to lose it either. I want to trust the people I love, but I know that as long as I love like this, I will always be waiting for the All Lives Matter moment, and that will be agonizing but I don’t think I’ll ever be unafraid of that. I do want to be able to love unconditionally, and I want to be able to love someone, no matter what color they are, but I think I’ll have to work towards that now. And I’m going to forgive myself for writing, even though it feels like the flattest form of speaking out. I know what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to love myself any more than I do. I’m not going to get better because things don’t just get better, you have to work to make them better, and sometimes even when you work hard they don’t change. I’m not going to stop loving the wrong people, and I think that’s okay as long as I eventually love the right one. I am not going to stop being hurt over the last two years of my bloody, torturous life, but I am going to stop turning back to it and asking it questions. 

I wish I could say I know my pain is so much lesser than everyone else's but of course, it doesn’t feel that way. Of course, my brain knows you’ve hurt harder and probably more, but my heart begs to stop being so warm and thick and pulsing. And I get up every morning and I go to class and I won’t let myself get too behind because I’m afraid of anyone knowing I need help and I’m afraid of wasting the future. I want love and I want happiness and I want to smile and I want Black pain to dissolve slowly, then all at once, and I want women to make the same amount as men or maybe more, and I want Black love to be here and alive and beautiful. I want that. I want less pain and more simplicity, and I think it exists, I want it to exist, because if it doesn’t, what else is there? What else can we live for?