It’s getting harder to write. The pressure continues to mount and as it turns out, every time I turn in something well-liked, it has to be even better the next time. It’s the first semester. I have things going into school that I was already working on and need more guidance. I bring them in, it goes well, I start wondering if my best writing was before I arrived and has left me when it starts to count in a different way.
I still get air when I write in my journal. I’ve noticed a dramatic change in my writing there, but only there. A week ago, I sank my flesh into it, the first time writing in it since moving to NY. All the beautiful words I couldn’t figure out how to get on the page flowed without shame. I could admit to everything. I could stop lying. In fact, I could admit that I was lying all the time. I reveal only slivers of me to everyone, depending on how they look at me, depending on when they dig deep into my eyes as we talk and when not. It tells me so much. Where are their thoughts, I ask myself. When in class, I find myself staring at the quietest students in the room. I have physical joy in my body when they speak.
There are different people. When one Jewish person discusses the work they are doing to archive the Holocaust and memorialize those stories as a way of understanding a Palestinian whose family line is likely stopped and their anxiousness to preserve it, there is a neglect of acknowledging that the Holocaust preceded Palestinians being forced off their land and now, occupied, have lost generations of family lines. It can’t be discussed. So much of what we implore of the world in our writing is too sensitive to do. It is. It really is. I don’t want to sit in a class, the only Black person among 19, discussing a poem where the author writes about Susan Smith, a white woman who killed her kids and then told the police it was a Black man. I don’t want to sit in that class where there is an uproar over the difference in the terms “cop” and “police”, everyone wailing back and forth because the energy has built into a freneticism, but then they are dead I mean in the grave when discussing this poem. No one has thoughts on what the Black man wrote about the Black man imagined. They do about Gertrude Stein writing about nouns being boring, adjectives hideous, commas, questions marks, and exclamation points ridiculous, verbs and adverbs glorious, periods as gods. But not about what the Black man wrote about the Black man imagined.
I just don’t want to. But I’ve done it before. In orchestra. In the LDS church. At school. I went to church, the LDS church, my first Sunday in NY. They can help me. With food and clothes. Finding a place to stay when I have to move out of housing. I had fun. Every moment of it–until–While leaving, there were three men in master’s programs. Business, dentistry, something else. They were locked in. I stopped to say goodbye, I called them Columbia as a group. They didn’t much turn. They didn’t hear me. I walk up to the group, “Bye…” I ask again their names and repeat them. They half, weird, quietly respond to the farewell. Everything was perfect and in the last tiny moment before leaving, I remembered what this would really be. Not intentionally, but by default. I know it so well.
I’m trying to move around. International friends, Black friends, BIPOC group, LGBTQ group, Columbia Journal–I’m doing it, I really am.
Look: Evolve 