For Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Dontre Hamilton, John Crawford III, Eric Garner, Michael Brown Jr, Ezell Ford, Tanisha Anderson, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Kimani Gray, Jerame Reid, Freddie Gray, et al.

(Here, a comprehensive list of the people killed by police in America in 2016. This is for those with the 'B' under the race column.)

-

Here is the headline - a new name, a similar face, the same body
                 black, bleeding, butchered
on the pavement.

You have my brother's smile, my father's eyes, my uncle's nose.

You look like me.

Yesterday you were someone's husband
                 and I know that when she sees you again in that black suit, her grief will split her down the middle because this is not how it was supposed to go
someone's father, someone's brother, someone's son, someone's friend.
Today, you are a hashtag.

And, my God bear witness, do I know anger. I feel rage. I grieve. I am drowning in sorrow.

You, my brothers, my sisters, your blood is staining the ground and they will feed me the thug narrative,
They will tell me you were a bad person,
That you had a gun/wore a hoodie/resisted arrest/were black.
You were guilty.
Your only crime the skin you were born in.

Tell me, America, does blood come out in the wash?
Can you dance on the tombstones and forget that is a graveyard?

We built your country, with all your luxuries, with our blood,
Our spines bent as we toiled.
We paid the price with our lives and still you show us our debt.

(The eight stages of genocide are classification, symbolisation, dehumanisation, organisation, polarisation, preparation, extermination and denial, in case you wondered if this sounded sorta familiar.)
And all we can taste is blood.
Soon we will hunger and thirst for it.

Negroes,
Sweet and docile,
Meek, humble and kind:
Beware the day
They change their mind!
Wind
In the cotton fields,
Gentle Breeze:
Beware the hour
It uproots trees!

-Langston Hughes

I fucks with black momma spirit magic real heavy.

I'm having a bad anxiety episode. I can't sleep, I've consumed a lot of caffeine to compensate and I'm suffering from abnormally horrid symptoms. The suffering tonight is that instead of sleep Im experiencing a semi-consciousness like sleep, except nothing at all like sleep, where I just lay in the dark scratching all my exposed skin until it stings and bleeds without realising. 

And then of course, I roll over and realise how much of my own skin is under my nails and my stomach lurches like I've almost crashed into a truck and I have to smush my face into a pillow because there's blood and skin under my nails and everything stings like pepper. 

Except then I hear my phone buzz and it is my mother: "Mani my spirit uneasy. Tell me you're okay"

Like I said, I fucks with black momma spirit magic heavy. You can't convince me that this isn't supm unreal. 

On the friendzone, AGAIN.

For the second time on this blog, I'm ranting about the "friendzone". The mythical friendzone that stems from the ignorant and entitled belief that my friendship is some consolation prize to my FRIENDS for my pussy. 

Why is it that after a certain period of time, and a certain depth of friendship, suddenly some people become dissatisfied with the friendship that they've been content with for years. For like thirteen years. Roughly. Through hide and seek and finger painting, through arguments in parking lots when you helped my friends ruin their relationships (because you knew and she knew that she had a boyfriend, but also very funny story because shortly after that he became my boyfriend too.... ahh, Mandeville. You'd have to live here to get it....) and through long distance military best friend letters to and from Germany, Amsterdam and the States. 

And now you're trying to convince me that you wanna wife me. And lay pipe in me. 

Like I'm not allowed to be twenty with friendships outside of the realm in which men want to date me and fuck me. Why is my life a series of Venn Diagrams where all the men in my life who aren't related to me must fall into subsets of the men who value me either romantically or sexually?  

Is this because I freely share the theory that best friend marriages are the realest ones? Well hell. I'm hardly ready for a serious relationship again much less a marriage, so slow down, Buster. You've got a little wait before I'm the woman I feel is ready for marriage. I need time. And a healthy space to develop organically. I could use some friends. 

Or is it that friends feel like after a certain stage of friendship—like if maybe you endure enough conversations and play dates and group hangouts and bonus points for if you remember when I had braces or better yet knew me before braces or next level gods who knew me before a full set of adult teeth—you suddenly become entitled to cash your points in for romantic entitlement? Because lemme know... I will be way more selective in my players if I have to put prizes away for the ones who ascend to the hall of fame. I only have one cookie after all and I couldn't be expecting you all to share it. Crumbs don't make a meal, right? 

Forgive me for being salty. I wasn't supposed to write any more salty posts fr a while (even though I almost wrote a very salty one undoing all my progress and discussing all the nasty ways I've discovered my first love is human and flawed, but I chose to settle for this aside instead). 

Goodbye my first love.

I've had this post to write for weeks, and I've been procrastinating on it and today I had a good sit down and evaluated what exactly I've been putting off and why... And I realise that I've been putting off the goodbye, because I know that this is the one that really counts; this goodbye is the goodbye you won't get, because it's to the you I knew; the final goodbye - the one I've been holding onto and dragging out. I have decided though, I have decided to tell you goodbye and tuck you into a box of nostalgia and move along. 

I had initially planned that the goodbye was to be in two or three posts, but since I waited so long, I've outgrown the phases I was to have written those posts in. Now I will settle for one (probably very long post) with multiple parts. I had also written a note in my phone to guide the posts but I dropped my phone a couple of days ago, and so I can't get to whatever I'd written there either. So basically, I'm just gonna freestyle this one and hope it doesn't get choppy. Whatever happens, happens. 

Also, happy belated birthday. I wanted to tell you, but I couldn't. I promised myself I wouldn't say anything else to you. I'm sorry. 


i.

I used to miss you with a fever, a cold sweat, panicked fits, the gnashing of teeth in my sleep. I used to miss you with a hot flush across my cheeks and my face. I used to miss you with a dry, aching swallow and a deep yearning. The ways I missed you begged for prescriptions - and you know how I love to self medicate... Vodka just made missing you feel like sharp, prickling pain. It made missing you feel like acid pumped into my blood. It made missing you feel like white hot fire in my mouth. That was worse. (You'd be pleased to know that I haven't been drinking anymore, if it mattered and if you knew and most importantly if we were anything and not nothing.)

I stopped missing you actively, all the time. I missed you in episodes, in moments that came and went. I missed you like a hot flash, like panic attacks, like my asthma. You were more of a dull ache than a strong pull. I missed you when something happened and you were the only person I wanted to tell, because you were the only person I knew who knew me that well. (I just wanted you to know that JK Rowling is publishing the script for The Cursed Child, that okay yes Arsenal wasn't going to stay at the top of the table for long, that I hadn't had an asthma attack in weeks and you would have been so happy, that I remembered that you promised to make curry chicken with me, that one time I sat on my leg so long I could actually swear that I was gonna have to get it amputated and sciatic nerves and things and my first mooting debate trial was fun and I didn't even have a panic attack, that I didn't fail Jurisprudence - I actually got a fucking B and wow how did that happen... but none of that matters anymore either.)

I've stopped missing you (almost all the time). I realised I was water on concrete. I just kept pouring and pouring and pouring onto you. And God I think maybe you were always fucking concrete, but maybe sometimes you were soft for me and sometimes I curled up on you despite the hardness... Ultimately, we proved that I had been skinning my knees on you for a long time. I've put you away, like toys from some childhood, some relics of better days when things were good but do not work anymore. I don't choke on nostalgia, or resentment, or bitterness. I don't ache for you.

"I changed my mind about you / I don't miss you like I used to." (I Love My Love by Reyna Biddy)

I have stopped avoiding all the places you memory lingers. The you I love is a memory now, a person that doesn't really exist anymore. You've become a ghost and these places are all for the living. I've stopped skirting through these places like stepping on graves. This new you, the you of the living world, I hardly see you either - but when I do, it doesn't bother me anymore.

I miss you now in the way I miss myself at fourteen, at ten, at eight, at five, at three. At fourteen, with the checkered Vans slip ons and the black skinny jeans and layering tees over long sleeves, playing obscene acoustic guitar, long dark hair and bangs tickling my eyelashes, the idea that I was invincible. At ten with curly hair and bruised knees and a boy best friend and purple football shoes and lunchtimes in the jungle of a garden with strawberry Monster Milk and laughing so hard we'd snort. At eight with my brother on the backseat of my dad's blue Mark II, long drives from Portland to Kingston, to Mandeville; the whole world a square of stars outside car window and my whole life ahead of me like the longest highway. At five, without fear. At three, with wonder. I miss you the way I miss all these people; without wanting you back, knowing you do not exist anymore. Not in the ways you did. I know that you cannot exist while the reality I know currently exists. I cannot be who I am now, with you.

"Neither can live while the other survives." (I've been dying to use a Harry Potter quote on this blog, thank you.)

So, in short, I miss you. I miss you a whole lot, and I probably will always miss you.... but not in the ways I used to miss you, and not the you that I think you are now. I miss the boy I met at fifteen with his untied tie and his growth spurt. I miss the boy I used to sit on my bedroom floor and talk to until he fell asleep. I miss the boy in the striped shirts and the stretched out white sock who held my hand while he drove through the Burger King drive-thru. I miss the boy with the dirty grey vans who sent me pictures of his mango Gatorade and the burning garbage bin and the orange highlighter. I miss the boy who made all the little things feel like big things. I miss the best friend I lost after four years and seven months. That you will always know that me better than anyone else.


ii.

I am so sorry. I have so very many things to be sorry for, and I want to not be sorry anymore. I want to move on from all the things I am sorry for and so I will apologise to you, like this, the only way I know how, the only option I have left.

I am sorry that I was so bad at saying how I felt - I felt so many things, all the time, and I never ever knew how to explain any of them to you. Like how I wanted to tell you that I wasn't always angry with you, I was just always tired of something that we could fix if maybe I knew how - I was tired of feeling like you wanted to be with someone else, tired of feeling like I wasn't helping (your panic attacks, your feelings of inadequacy, everything). I was tired, oh so tired, of feeling like you felt sorry for me, and that was why you stayed. I was so tired of being your unstable, inconsistent burden. I just always felt these things and never knew how to tell you any of these things.

I am sorry that I was the shittiest communicator in the whole world. I am sorry that I made excuses for being a shitty communicator. I'm sorry that I never tried to be better at communicating until it was too late. I am so sorry that I had so many things I needed to say and never said. I am so sorry for all the conversations that should have happened and shouldn't have happened, because I didn't know how to communicate properly.

I am sorry for all the nasty words I threw your way. Regardless of how I felt, and what happened, I shouldn't have said those things to you. I wish I could take those back, not because I didn't feel them, but because I'm sure they hurt you and hurting you didn't make anything better. Getting even wouldn't have fixed anything, and thankfully they didn't make us even. It just made me an ass. I'm sorry for being an ass.

I'm sorry for all those insecurities. Both for having them and for sharing them with you, but mostly for sharing them with you. I think insecurities can't be avoided, but I obsessed over those things and I let them drive me crazy. I turned them into a wedge between us, and when I couldn't take it anymore - I shared them with you. I shouldn't have, and I wish I hadn't. Now they hang there, in that space, heavier than they should have been. I am sorry I expected you to carry those burdens with me. I suppose your response was the one I deserved.

I am sorry for the overreactions (particularly the overreaction about the rumours I thought you started, and the overreaction about the stupid essay you had to go home to write, and the overreaction about a condom). I am sorry for the arguments I started (the one about the asthma attack, and the one in May and all the little ones that left nicks like shaving with a new razor).

I am sorry for everything, even the things I did that I can't remember and the things that you think don't matter and the things that probably don't actually matter. I am sorry that we both hurt each other a lot. I am so sorry for all the horrible things in four years and seven months.

Very importantly, I am sorry for the impression of you I've held for four whole months. I am sorry that before that I had you on a pedestal. Both times I forgot that you were human and failed to leave you room to be just that. I am sorry, and I am letting both of these things go. You are no longer on a pedestal and I am letting go of the way I felt about you in the past few months. You are human, and I acknowledge both the good and the bad. I am sorry that this wasn't always the case.


iii.

Now I want to tell you a million thank yous. I want to tell you thank you for listening, for caring, for making sure I ate, for worrying when I was sick or sad or anxious or going through things I didn't want to talk about. You were one of the most gentle people in my life and it sometimes still makes me a little teary with gratitude.

I don't think you know just how much I have to be grateful to you for. You don't realise how much better you managed to make the shitty parts of me. You held me together when I tried to hold everything else together. You kept me grounded, reminded me to be gentle with myself and take care of myself. You told me it was okay every time you saw me cry. (And here I had to pause because I tried to blink away my tears to keep typing and I couldn't... you know how hard I fight tears, and you know they always win.) And my God, you saw me cry so many times. Thank you for holding me tight to your chest until the tears passed.

Thank you for believing in me, for seeing things in me that I couldn't see in myself and for reminding me of those things when I needed to hear it most. I still hope that one day I'll be the great things you thought I was. Thank you.

Less sappy of me, but still kinda sappy... Thank you for the little things. For feeding me, for the compliments, for the hugs, for rubbing my head and my back. For making me laugh. For indulging me with shows and videos with never waning enthusiasm. For the kisses - all the different kinds of kisses, all very appreciated. Thank you for the conversations - the years of conversations. Thank you for teaching me lots of new things - I appreciate how well rounded you helped me become in four years.

Thank you for the littler things. For approving my selfies. For writing things that would make me smile on the corners of my notes. For wake up calls when I was worried about oversleeping. For fries and icecream. For funny pictures. For sharing moments of your day with me. For stolen moments of comfort. For letting me sleep on you. For letting me steal your food. For the silly things. For the inside jokes (walking from the bowl only takes three minutes after all). For just being you.

Thank you, separately and very seriously, for being a safe, nurturing and trusting environment for exploration and experimentation. For never taking anything too seriously, and indulging fantasies - both shared and personal. Thank you for being a safe, considerate first. And yes, I'm taking about that.


iv.

Finally, even though we are nothing, we once were everything. I don't think we'll be friends. I don't think we'll ever really be much of anything. In a few years, I'm sure I'll just be a name that you might stumble across in your memory and you'll remember but not really. One day I'll just be one of many. It won't matter.

But for a long time, it mattered. It mattered a whole lot.

It mattered so much, and I won't deny that, but I want you to find something that matters more. I want both of us to find better. I want us to do the things we did wrong, right. I want us to be happy. Both of us.

I'm actually really happy, if it matters to you. I hope you're happy too.

In your next relationship, and the ones after if there are ones after and what not, I want you to find someone who loves you so very very much.

I want you to find someone who sees you at your worst and holds you til your worst is gone, and loves you still. I want you to have someone to hold through heaven and hell, and I want you to know that both things are normal in a relationship. I want you to find someone worth staying with despite the hell for the heaven, even if you find yourselves in hell way more often than you find yourselves in heaven. I want the heaven to be worth it for you. I want you to find someone who loves you so much that the hell feels like heaven. I want you to be so happy that fire feels like laughter.

I want you to find someone who is proud to have you, even if you still think you're inadequate. I want you to find someone who thinks you're amazing, like really really really amazing, from the top of your head all the way to your tippy toes. I want you to find someone who loves you through the caveman stubble and the policeman/creepy uncle mustache and not just on the "oh yes daddy" days. I want you to find someone who won't mind your stretched out socks, and the holes in your underwear and the fact that almost all the shirts you own are striped.

I want you to find someone who makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you scream, makes you understand why everyone says love makes you crazy - I want you to be crazy about them. I want you to find real, pure, honest love. Unconditional love. Selfless love. I want you to find someone who doesn't mind when you're sick and doesn't resent you for all the time they'll spend taking care of you. I want you to find someone you want to take care of, too. One day you'll both be old and taking care of each other and it won't be exciting, but I want you to have that too.

I want you to find someone who won't even mind that you sleep across the bed. I want all these lovely things for you. I hope you find all these amazing things. (And in a way, I hope I never have to know if you ever do find these things. I don't want to know if you don't, because I don't want to feel bad for you or bad about you or anything. And I don't want to know if you do, because I don't ever want to know how someone else is doing it better than I did and I don't want to compare myself to someone else, because God I'm not doing anymore of that for you. In my head, it is enough to want these things for you without having to know about them in real life.)

I wish you the very very very best, because you mattered. You mattered so much to me and I don't hate you, and I don't resent you but I can't write about you anymore and I can't cry about you anymore and this is it because this is all I have left. I don't have anything left to offer you, and I know that what I have is not enough so I will leave it here and I'll wish you the best and I'll move on.

Goodbye my first love.

On finding a purple and grey high school tie in the back of my closet, pathetically titled like everything else seems to be

I decided to take the rest of the week off and come home (mostly because I'm tired of eating campus food and I have like two or three loads of dirty clothes, sheets and towels to wash - but also just because), and tonight, in an attempt to be productive without actually touching the pile of work I brought home, I decided to clean out my closet.

In doing so, I found a purple and grey school uniform tie knotted around a hanger in the back of my closet. Now, the thing about this tie is that it has been in the back of my closet since 2011, which really doesn't seem like that long for something to be hiding in the back of one's closet. Except 2011 was a whole dozen and a half lifetimes ago. In the time between then and now, we have become different people dozens and dozens of times. That tie hung there, knotted around that hanger, through our sixteen month relationship. Through the months short of a year that we didn't speak. While we were awkwardly making small talk at the orthodontist. While we slowly relearnt our ropes in 2014 and pushed all the boundaries. While we had shared anxiety about moving to university. It stayed here, miles from us there, while I made you my second first and so on. It stayed here while we made something ugly out of our relationship. Stayed here while I packed your things into a box, even that necklace I kept for four years because I loved you that whole time (the point being that this tie should have been in the box of things I didn't need to cherish anymore because I was letting it all go, even this stupid tie had I remembered its existence). It stayed here while we stopped speaking and I deleted your number and unfriended you on Facebook.

And... It's still here.

*glares at the offending tie*

I don't want your tie. I don't want it in my room. I don't want any more reminders that once upon a time (once upon a tie hehe) this wasn't what we were. I don't yearn for you anymore, but I also don't want the softness of nostalgia crawling into my bedroom because nostalgia is my real enemy - it keeps reminding me of the person you were, the person I actually yearn for, the person that doesn't exist. (And as I think of the offensive tie, I remember that once you and I sat in this bedroom together - that tie hanging in the back of the closet, silently waiting for this day - and I want to set this room on fire and burn this house down. You see how this stupid tie came to ruin my night?)

Now I can't just dump the tie, because though I'm sure I've dumped material objects of more significant real value before, I don't believe in dumping material objects of actual value (you know, sentimental value and whatnot) and this tie has sentimental value to me as my exboyfriend's tie, but I'm sure it must have some sentimental value to you as your high school tie... (Which lends the question of Why did you even give this to me in the first place?) I mean, I'd like to politely offer it back to you... but I will most certainly not to be digging up your number to message you again, and certainly not over a fucking bumbo pussy raas claat tie because yuh nah make me feel like shit and blue tick me and that foolishness over a damn tie. My pride is still recovering. ...I could just, like, thumbtack it to your door? But then I'd have to go out of my damn raas way to walk to your block to return this stupid tie, and I swore to myself I was never going out of my way to you or your hall again. ...Another option is that I could just give your neighbour to give it to you, but I'm currently not really maintaining much of a friendship with him either, and I refuse to stir him into this pot of petty porridge we've cooked up like two asses. Plus, how would I explain this? "Oh, I'm returning a tie he doesn't need and won't wear and probably doesn't even remember because I'm very serious about keeping all the sentiment out of my life because sentiment invites nostalgia and I need no nostalgia because I don't want to miss a person who doesn't exist anymore and ugh, I just don't want to remember how happy I felt four years ago when he insisted I take the stupid tie because he doesn't make me happy anymore. Just, like, give it to him and stop looking at me like that."

So I guess I'll just.... leave it here?

Or I could stuff it into the bottom of my bag when I'm packing to go back to school and then wait until I get drunk, like properly drunk... like, fucking wasted, and then do some stupid shit like let the chips land where they may and show up at your door with a stupid tie, drunk off my ass. (This is a joke. A really dry, sardonic joke... but a joke nonetheless. A joke only I will get. And maybe you would have, if... you know... I dunno. But yeah. This is a nod at that one time I really missed you, and my friends made me drink lots of liquor to make me forget I missed you, and then I showed up drunk at your door and that was probably up there with the stupidest things I've ever done to wound my pride... but is now just a joke that I laugh about all the time, by myself.)

Anyways. It's a tie. Belonging to the old you. The you I miss fondly. The you before you rolled in glitter and forgot you were gold and turned into some glittery, less lovely version of the niceness you were. And I'm going to roll it into a ball and throw it back into my closet and stop pretending to be productive and just give in and watch Bob's Burgers for like four hours, without shame.

I'm actually way too happy this month, and lately, to be obsessing over a tie... and on a related note, I've been writing the last post in this series for a few days now. It's sort of an 'I miss you, but not really and not in the ways I used to' post, and is supposed to be the "last" (maybe) post I write about you, and without bias or objection. I may turn it into two posts, or three depending. But the point is that the end is near, and the feeling is almost all gone and I'm trying to make the most of this new objective perspective it's given me to write the end. I'm so excited it is almost palpable.

(lol i write like i have readers, but i do... these posts will be read by lots of different people. lots of different versions of me. mes from the future who will look back at these posts and remember these feelings, and that's why i write. it matters to me that i can reflect, look back, remember. it matters that i documented these feelings because they mattered, then - now? - and i will want to know what mattered even when it no longer matters)

The thing I've learnt about letting go is this

It doesn't happen all at once like we think it does. You don't actually wake up one day and everything is suddenly, magically better and you don't know how or why but you don't hurt. It's not quite like that.

It's more like taking two steps forward, three steps forward, one backward and so on... Until you look up and you're there, and you look back and the person you've been holding onto is so far away that you can't run back to them anymore, and a part of you doesn't want to. It's like uncurling your fingers one at a time, until your hands are empty. Sometimes, your fist is going to clench reflexively - some days you're going to want nothing more than to run back to that person, despite whatever happened between you - and on those days you have to start from scratch, opening each finger until your empty palms are turned down.

Letting go is not easy. Grieving is not easy. I know these things to be true, but you know what else I know to be truer? That holding on to someone who has let go of you is even harder than letting them go. You are hanging onto the rope so tightly that you're blistering. You're tying yourself up in the rope like you're going to use to hang yourself, and if you keep this up, you will hang yourself with the rope and they will not be there to untie you.

This is not what I wanted. A year ago feels like a thousand feelings ago, two different people ago. A year ago feels like some alternate dimension, like some world where those things can happen that is not here but not there either. A year ago is immortalised in memory - two kids on the backseat of a car with no resentment and nothing to let go of. Two different kids.

I am nostalgic, but I am strong. I am not grieving anymore. I can listen to our songs, and I have no desire to reopen a door for you with the intention of seeking some closure that doesn't exist. And, yes, sometimes I relapse and those are the days I document the most... but most days, I am an open palm. And those are the days I hold out for, even on days when I am clenched fist.



I went to the beach two days ago, and sat on the sand and had that "aha!" moment when I realised that this life, my life, all these things; they're all transient. There will be a day when I don't exist, and the people who knew me will not exist, and I will be a block of stone in a yard of graves of people who don't really exist anymore either. The things I feel - the good, the bad, the ugly, the really ugly - will not matter. The days I spent curled under purple comforter, both too empty and too full to cry, and the days I tipped my head back and let laughter spill out from inside me... none of these days will be remembered. Everything goes, and I'm trying to be at peace with that. Everything goes. Even me, and even you. It will all go - washed away like the sands in the tide. And I have to let it all go.