In a second:
I’m seeing your eyes and your face when you’re looking down upon me.
I expect to see hatred in your eyes and anger in your face, but in the moment before my eyes close, I see instead that there is blindness and blankness.
You hate me for being born the way I was born.
The second before my eyes close, the last prayer leaves my lips, and it is not a prayer for me, but one for you.
Because I feel sorry you were born the way you were born.
I imagine myself looking down upon you the way you are now and I think: that could never be, because who I am is indelible. And then I think: it could, it could, it could. I do not have the power to erase narratives written for miles and miles in blood and stone, and you do not have it either. Maybe the way we are born does make us the people we become.
The way I was born has made me a person who lies prostrate and frozen beneath the knees and the fists of another person. It makes me think, if I had a gun, maybe I would shoot you.
Deep inside your eyes I see the reflection of my own, slowly going dark.
Deep inside your eyes, I see fear.
You hold me down like a pen pressing down into blank paper, slowly blotting.
You darken the lines that were, maybe, just beginning to fade. You darken them and it’s like they weren’t fading after all.
In a second, we are something bigger than people.
We are the narrative.
The weight of it crushes the breath out of my lungs.
I used to think my freedom was indelible like the colour of my skin.
I swore I’d never beg you for it, because I wouldn’t for a second let you believe you had taken it from me.
I used to hope, to pray, that your cruelty, your hate, your prejudice, was not indelible. Perhaps it is not.
The narrative is not indelible.
You just keep writing it over.
5/6/2020
BLACK LIVES MATTER. ALL LIVES MATTER.