Title

The first person I told “I’m a writer” was a White police officer who had put me in the back seat of his car with my hands cuffed behind my back. It didn’t frighten me. I had been in that predicament before but this time I was angry. Livid that a neighbor called the police because I had pulled over to eat my lunch, read, write, and be Black. Quiet neighborhood, hardly any traffic, about 2-3 minutes from home.

Accused of doing PCP,

“Do you know what PCP is?” The officer asked after going back and forth for a while about whether I was doing it. He was already sensing that I wasn’t doing what they were accusing me of, but that didn’t matter anymore. They were too deep in it, had to save face because my face is brown. Turns out there is a thing people do where they dip cigarettes in PCP (I refuse even to this day to look up what that stands for) and smoke it, I assume in an undetectable way. I had never heard that this was thing.

“No. What is it?” My face scrunched. I didn’t know what it was so I didn’t have to act it, but I wanted to say more than just “I don’t know.” I wanted to say this is incredulous; Or, in not so big a word, fuck the fuck off. (Don’t wince at my words. Wince at the scene taking place). It was likely the only moment I could raise my voice and cut my syllables in sharp blades of pronunciation.

When he decided to search my car, I told the officer kindly, tenderly, with a voice in flight dangling softly in the air, no knife slicing away in my words of defense. It wasn’t the time for it. This is when Black people enduring illegality from the police know they shouldn’t fight for their rights with fighting words, demeanors, or physicalities.

“Officer…you don’t have a warrant to search my car.” I shouldn’t have said anything, but I wasn’t talking to him. I was talking to his body camera.

“Ok put your hands behind your back.”

No problem. I know this part. The intention to scare me. With handcuffs on, sitting in back of the car, this is when people get nervous and sometimes have a little bit of a breakdown as I did in the past. There wasn’t that; I did not satisfy.

I had my hands slightly in the air, kept them visible the entire time. The two of them took turns telling me to put my hands down and I’d feign doing so, lowering them just a little bit before gradually raising them back in the air. I moved Tai chi slowly, fully straightening my arms and shifting them through the air, my hands remaining far from my body until my shoulders were low enough to position my hands behind me. I incrementally turned my body as they fell—my hands were never out of their sight. That wasn’t for the body camera. That was for them. Staying okay at that time in the present was more important than being compliant on video.

And I had my own video. I started recording the very moment the police told me that they smelled PCP. I laughed at first. I thought the very idea of me doing PCP was hilarious. I naively thought it was a joke. At that point I was still sitting in my car and they were still in theirs. They had stopped already and asked me if I had seen anyone suspicious. I said no, but I should have said yes. Saying no alerted them that I was the suspicious person someone had called the cops on. They drove away; I felt odd, I felt off. It was done.

I’ll never make that mistake again.

I watched them drive down the street until they reached the next intersection. I watched them make a U-turn. I watched them drive back in my direction. I watched them as they passed me until getting to the other intersection. I watched them make another U-turn. I watched them drive back in my direction. I was watching because even though I didn’t know that it was me, I knew that it is always me.

It’s a nice neighborhood, the same one I lived in because I also lived in a nice neighborhood. A drive further down the road and there was the house. I only had to turn to go up the driveway, but I effectively lived on the same street, Woodbine Avenue, that my neighbors deemed me suspicious. When they stopped again at my car, I knew what I didn’t know but truly never stopped knowing: it was me.

The officer cuffed me, put me in the police car, left me to soak in fear. It was the turning point for the Latino officer who spoke to me first, cussed me out before I ever got out of the car. “Cut the bullshit,” he said with a colored accent. If I started to speak to him in Spanish, we could have had a no-bullshit conversation. One where I could hide from the White officer and tell him that he should be ashamed, that his brother, his mother, his sister, his child always had to tell the cops that their family member was a police officer so they could stop being criminalized for being brown.

It was the turning point for him because he knew that his White partner was going all the way, then even further. From that point on, he was quiet. He’d stand behind his partner and give me you’re going to be okay nods while putting his hand up slightly at waist length and barely discernibly shaking his head to clue me when to stop talking—and I did. I’d stop talking when he cued and kept talking when he’d stay motionless. Confusion. Conflicting emotion for do I feel gratitude?

While cuffed in the police car, the White officer started his illegal search. I had an open wine bottle in the back seat. Before they stopped the second time, I put it on the floor behind the passenger seat and covered it with trash-looking scraps—the plastic bag and the paper bag my food was in. (I could tell that story, but it’s not the story that matters. Don’t be distracted by it). He didn’t thoroughly search the car because he knew I wasn’t doing drugs.

And that was something that came up. The White officer asked me if I’d ever done drugs at all. Yes. Six years ago (nine years ago now) I did cocaine before my last emergency stay in the hospital for mental health reasons. “It’s all documented,” I told him.” He paused and his eyes grew wide, maybe because the answer was too true. Why tell on myself if I were trying to prove my innocence?

Then came the strangest part. He came back to the police car, opened the door and bended over from his waist to meet me at eye level.

“You’re smart? You go to school?”

In the passenger seat my computer was open with the essay I was writing. I wish I could remember which one. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace was on the dashboard. In my book bag was more books and documents from Columbia University. It was the first thing he’d said with a tone that wasn’t authoritative. My skin wasn’t so brown to him anymore. I had become less Black to him. I was doing things that he thought only White people do.

This is when it happened—the first time I said, I’m a writer. I hadn’t yet published anything. I hadn’t yet done anything that said so except the jotting down of meandering thoughts on this here blog. It was angered out of me, frightened out of me, saying it for the first time, claiming it as a title. Even then, I used it to topple his easiness at harassing me. If I’m a writer, I can do you damage. You won’t get away with this.

He won’t. It’s been three years since that happened in the city of brotherly love—Philadelphia— and this is the first I’ve been able to write about it. I’ve tried a few times. Even tried to submit it for an assignment at Columbia. I couldn’t. My brain wouldn’t. I’ve had nightmares, emotional flare-ups I didn’t see coming. I look down and hold my head every couple of minutes writing it now.

It wasn’t just them as police officers. It was me as a woman with two tall, very well-built men standing over me planking both sides on my left and on my right with intimidating tones and a violent physical presence. I had the injustice of being Black before police officers and the trepidation of being a woman before two threatening men. It’s a different kind of double consciousness that W.E.B Dubois could never write about no matter how hard and intelligently he might have tried. It’s the ever-shifting intersections that Audre Lord embodied, Kimberlé Crenshaw defined.

~

A month later I saw those two police officers in a 7-eleven while buying cigarettes. The cigarettes that weren’t only damaging my lungs but that they had used to psychologically damage my mind. I locked eyes with both of them individually. I followed their movements throughout, staying still, catching their glance whenever they dared look up at me. The White officer put down whatever few things he went in there to buy and hurried back out to the police car. He never checked out at the register. The Latino officer made intentional eye contact with me while looking around the store. When he went to the check-out counter, I finally got in line to purchase my PCP-dripped cigarettes.

“You guys harassed me a couple of months ago,” I said to him, no daintiness in my voice. It was the low voice I slip into when I’m in deep discussion contemplating an intricate topic. The deep voice I subconsciously slip into to let people know that “I’m smart. I go to school.”

“No we weren’t harassing you.” he said with a soft smile, his voice now dangling in fragile air. A sympathetic voice. A guilty voice. Cut the bullshit, I wanted to say.

“I remember you,” he continued. I knew what he was doing. I didn’t care about him being apologetic about the system while being a part of the system. I knew that had I not followed his cues, everything might have turned out differently. I knew—and I cared—but I didn’t excuse. I had already worked through my conflicting emotions of gratitude. I wasn’t grateful.

“Yes. You did,” I said.

He bought his merchandise and slowly made his way to the door. Seeing them again, saying something, and using the accusatory voice I wasn’t able to use a month prior told me that I would one day write about it and when that day came, it would be only the first writing of many.

One thing, only one thing came from it all, made me stronger than I had ever been before and that was claiming a title.

I’m a writer.

Late at Night

Late at night I’m listening to music. I’m not writing. I’m not reading. I’m not searching authors and literary awards. I’m not thinking about how to approach my next story—what story should be told, what it means to me, why it matters.

I’m listening to music. The oldest of the music that changed me forever, made me want to cling for dear life to whatever I knew, whatever I had at the time to understand why the life I live would mean something to myself and others who would share my oxygen.

I went two years without listening to music. The sound of it, the sound—sound—hurt too much. That thing that I had learned for decades how to channel. Sound being more than what ears hear, but what minds crave. When my mind, because of music, escaped me, sound began to destroy me. Not music, but sound all by itself begging to be organized into something that could speak.

And now that I write, sound is all I can form into sentences. Words have started to escape me yet hold me hostage. I wanted words to free me and now all I can write is harmony. What does it sound like, is all I can ask when I write a sentence. What does it sound like?

I remember when sound eviscerated me, scraped my insides down to only blood vessels, no organs to pump my blood. Sound made me weak—more than weak: skeletal. I was defeated, humiliated, dehumanized by what I had for years waged war against and conquered.

Now—right now—and also the now of so many nights past, I yearn, sacrifice on the altar for my ability to hear the words that form in my skeletal psyche. I gain all control then lose it over and over again when a sound sizzles and steams above my consciousness. It doesn’t need me anymore; it waits for me to come to it, slows down for me to catch it, reach for it, slam it down under my palms and stomp it under my feet.

And I do. I do trample it. I shatter it into shards reflecting slices of myself sharp on every edge, prickling my skin at the touch of them with barely visible sprinkles of blood where the callouses on my hands once formed.

Words are for speaking. I’m tired of hearing my own voice. Late at night, I want to sit still. I want to listen.

Writ(h)ing at Columbia University

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.

Struggle Truth

Social media is social media. Sometimes the pictures and announcements portray the truth of our happiness, joy, and hope. Other times, the pictures and announcements are to create what we wish the truth to be. It’s not always a malicious endeavor. We hope. We hope for…

Part of my writing journey is to share the truth that I would certainly want to hide. It’s scary. Downright terrifying. But it’s also liberating. I don’t need anyone to read any of what I have shared, but I know—and am released because of it—that I’ve said a truth. Any truth. Because every time I post good news, great news, I feel the importance of also saying, “This isn’t all of it. There’s more.” It doesn’t mean I’m wallowing in pain. Maybe I am, but maybe I’m just showing that pain and joy can coexist.

I’ve had this blog for over a decade. I’ve shared during my worst of human experience thus far. And my hope, my hope is…that it remains the worst, that it will only get better from here. Or there. The “there” that was mental illness, substance abuse, unemployment, isolation, and abandonment.

Yet it is better. I just got hired by the New York Times. They got in touch to say they’ve read my writing and want to know if I’m NY. I’m not. Yet I’m moving there in August to start a writing degree at Columbia University. And my honest truth: I may not finish it. The way I struggle, it may be one more unfinished ventures that I have too many of to count.

It is no coincidence. I’ve agonized in prayer for five years over getting into a graduate school program with money to pay for it. I’ve already turned down offers that came with no scholarship. Over the years that I prayed, I acknowledged that if I got into a graduate school program without any money to finance it, it didn’t come from God. I withdrew from offers in agony to honor that it wasn’t from God. It wouldn’t be an answer to the prayers I’ve cried out of my mouth and out of my heart after years of a broken career path punctuated by struggle.

Now that it comes, now that I have a scholarship, now that the NYT has hired me with the question of “do I live in NY?” I can rejoice. Yet my rejoicing doesn’t change the heartbreak and turmoil that I face with the very diagnosis that stalled my life, made it into a dry dust swirling through the desert with nowhere to go and no origin to identify where it came from.

It still hurts. I still hurt. And I write this to say:

No matter what social media tells you, people are still hurting. Some people are hurting so much that they lie on social media just to envision what life could be if only they had the ability to live it.

The truth of the matter is that truth often becomes what people want the truth to be—not what it really is.

Guilt

Sometimes I want him back.

I hardly spoke to him the last year. When the news came, I scrambled through my messages to find out the last time we had spoke, the last words he had said to me.

“I’m never going to stop hounding you to talk to me. I know sometimes I say the inappropriate but I’m a writer. I do hope that I haven’t distanced you with words. I love you so much it makes me cry. You have helped me get through personal anguish…and are my best friend.”

When I read it out loud the weekend he went further, my voice cracked, then shook; the tears rolled out of my mouth. The first time I read it, I squinted my eyes and slightly lifted the right corner of my top lip. The second time, this time, I choked, tripped over my panic, and fell.

He had emotions never repressed enough to go unnoticed and never small enough to be forgotten after they had passed. Whether filled with love and affection or bitter cruelty, they were all of the same grotesque nature that frightened me. I’d hold my breath until I could tiptoe away as delicately and quietly as possible, then go months without talking to him.

I didn’t respond that time. I didn’t talk to him for four months and would have kept not talking to him, but he died. He killed himself, slowly, drinking alcohol. He had chances. He’d been to the hospital a few times to be patched together, his booboos kissed and patted gently before getting all the information needed about his dying body in order to live. He’d always stop drinking and try his hand at living, but eventually he’d start trying to die again.

I spent the last year of his death hiding from what killed him: those God-Forsaking Emotions. I cried harder because I understood him too well; the lost music, the bruised writing, the un-beautiful drawing and always the disasters. Our lives were just so disastrous. I had had my own binges while visiting him, cocaine and peyote in the night, alcohol and marijuana throughout the day, cigarettes at all times. He only watched, only sipping alcohol throughout, but I wouldn’t (not couldn’t) notice that he only drank alcohol, all day, all night, even when I had come off a binge and was laying low. 

The same thing killing him was killing me, too.

“Yeah I just spent two days doing research on bipolar and I have all the characteristics. You’re brilliant. Now I’m well again.”

Nothing I said before or after, but that’s how he’d write direct messages, like he’s in the middle of a very detailed conversation. Two months after researching what was killing him, he died. I knew it was killing him for years when I figured it out for myself–when I saw how alone I really was, looking at myself like I was watching a TV show–but only told him six months before. Remorse for not responding much, regret for not visiting more, but guilt for not telling him what mattered. He should have known, but I didn’t tell him. In the end, he helped me live and I had helped him die.

Shon always took the time to tell me that my life was worth living and needed to be lived as if he had it scheduled on his calendar. When words; music; life decided me repugnant, an email would appear in my inbox with a paragraph of nonsense, a noise clanging, mp3 file, or just three words. You are brilliant or You are beautiful or, and mostly, I love you.

“Sometimes you have to collect. Follow the sun and moon. Put your ear to the ground, taste the wind, play in the dirt, bathe in the ocean, scream loud onto the universe, Look at Saturn and watch the rings. Then write!”

Shon told me that he wrote everyday which is why he wrote a lot of crap. He didn’t mind producing thirty-eight hideous stories just to arrive at the one. He didn’t agonize over every word he wrote: words didn’t enslave him the way they demean me. It’s not all to his credit; words have meaning, and Shon didn’t always take that seriously, if at all. It’s why he could be completely wrong, hateful, hurtful, vulnerable, exposed, sordid, stuck, or even trapped. He sometimes was caught off guard by how much his words gave him away because he didn’t seize the meaning before he let them go.

He had to apologize a lot. But he always did; he always knew how. It came so easily to him that it made me think it was possible to apologize at any moment that an apology proved necessary. I always sort of thought apologies were like money: valuable, secretive, improper to talk about in public, tucked away in savings and stored away for the future, always the future. Used improperly, an apology would be openly vaunted, thrown around needlessly, carelessly, used always for the present moment to satisfy momentary desires–that’s how often Shon apologized to me. He always meant them. They were scrupulously sincere. I hated that he never gave me a chance to be unforgiving.

He allowed himself the freedom to write the same way he banged on the piano. He could smash words together, pile them up just to topple them over, color them with paint or splash them in mud, even smear them in his own blood if he needed them to cry out in agony. Shon enslaved words and tortured them into generational submission. Almost every single thing he sent me I couldn’t read or didn’t know how to read and would stop trying because it hurt my head and sometimes my feet, but when he, or the words, or both, were finally ready, he’d send me a masterpiece that would smother me in illustrations so vivid, story lines so thick, characters so alive and miraculous that I’d either drown in self-loathing for my utter incapability to write the way he could or I’d fly above hope, above talent, above reason with a soaring belief that I can write, too, simply by gripping Shon’s authority.

His work, whether luminous or despairing, inflicted a grotesque burning of the emotions, searing the flesh. And so was his presence, which is why I almost always struggled to be around him even while relishing his asymmetry.

Shon was apprehensive. Not of the bad, but of the good. If he were here in the void of 2020, vindication would be his. It was the joy, the present, the everlasting-ness of love that he didn’t fight for and wouldn’t take the time to see, to understand that the good wasn’t settled in goodness, but in the trying.

The trying part of his life was playing his creature; his guitar. Shon, the most miserably enthusiastic person I oftentimes wished I’d never grown so close to, had an improvising mind that metamorphosed his guitar, splitting the seven strings he had on that creature he called a guitar into two dozen more. It grew legs every time he touched it. Sometimes it breathed fire.

It was the only trying part of his life that could have kept him alive if he just played it without thinking he ever needed anybody else to do it. All those musicians who were never worthy of him helped kill Shon, too. He never should have started needing them.

And that’s how he always talked to me. Like he needed me, like he couldn’t create without me. It was never true, but he made it true. He forced it into truthfulness.

He must have told me he loves me more than anyone ever has–and taught me how to say it, too

I write the forced truth now because Shon would hate me all the way down deep in the pitch darkness and rotting flesh of his grave if I didn’t. He wrote his own eulogy and told me to read it at his funeral. The last sentences of the eulogy: “He is not resting in peace because that would be a huge tragedy; so don’t wish him a peaceful rest. That pisses him off.”

Since Shon already wrote his own closing, I don’t need to close for him:

“He is not gone, he has just gone further, and that takes balls…He chose the loneliest path because he followed his heart, perhaps into immanent doom, but knowingly. When the final day came there was no sense of human understanding. He knew it. It challenged him through vivid imagination and plagued him all of his life….So he decided to die. Yesterday never ended for him. There always was that sort of contrast of now against memory and that is what took away his tomorrow. Yes, we cannot, and will not live in the past, but there are dreams of a war that could’ve been fought a little harder. Instead of sleeping with defeat, struggling with the now, and all of time, he decided to belong to nothing.”

Formulaic

I have nothing to write about although there is so much to write about, always, whether I have it or not. But I always do. That’s my curse–that’s why I get stuck too often, or not enough: the impulsive times when I need to slow down and think about my next decision.

Writing can require that I stop (because merely slowing down isn’t enough to write), but it can also tangle my brain and draw a blank when I don’t know/can’t find the words to speak to or of the heart. It can stop me the wrong way, binding my tongue when the best thing for me to do is speak. Or the simplicity of simply needing to say ‘hello’ to myself, to remind myself that I’m still there even when I’m not here.

When writing blocks, it could be blocking outside noise and give me quiet, but most times, the quiet gives me too much liberty, not enough freedom. It liberates my silence, but doesn’t always break me free from what I was silent about–it doesn’t free me of myself.

It does feel good though. Sometimes that’s all I need although it’s rarely ever all I want. I don’t believe in happiness anymore. Only wholeness. I’ve learned that I can be unhappy, but still whole. I’ve learned that I can’t be un-whole and still be happy. Writing gives me happy, but not whole.

Yet most times, I still tend to find myself trying to write my way to whole. Because the idea of knowing how to say something, how to put intangible things into words, is wholly magnifying: the microscope showing me all the nano-bits that can’t be researched by the naked eye.

That’s why I like physics. It’s so close to the word psyche, and just like psychology, it can’t be seen under a microscope. My brain will never reveal what’s in my mind and a formula will never reveal the truth.