Bruised Not Broken

Love scares me. It does. The poet Audre Lorde once said "when we are loved, we are afraid love will vanish."
And we are afraid love will never return, leaving us with alone with holes in our hearts as big as the craters on the moon.
I haven't loved as much as I should because I fear my heart won't be able to take it, that I will go down with one sucker punch to the gut. I am afraid of rejection. We all are.
But as I've grown older, I realize that to love is to risk rejection and to love is to open yourself up to be wounded.
That's why we are careful about who we open our hearts to, who we allow into that sacred place. We are hardwired for self-protection, to do what is necessary to survive.
And it hurts when someone you spent hours and hours with, holding their hands, laughing with, kissing, counting the moments apart before you can see each other again, is gone because this just won't work anymore. The connection is lost. The pain is so much that the thought of seeing her again is too much and you go about the business of deleting her from your life, as impossible as that may be.
But I believe that love is worth it. It has to be. And I have to have faith that even if this love doesn't work out, love in the end will win out.
I believe we are stronger than we ever thought we could be and that we only find our strength through pain, when our faith is tested, when we choose to love in places where hate wants to dominate.
Love is a choice, a scary choice, because there's no guarantee that the love we give will be received in the same way. There's no guarantee that we won't get hurt.
Yet, if all we are is afraid of the bad that might happen, we miss the good. So like some adrenaline-addicted bungee jumper, I take the plunge, with my eyes open and my brain working, into the deep unknown, my heart uncaged, sifting through the ne'er-do-wells to find her, the one who is worth all the hell, the slice of heaven on earth that I would journey to Hades to get. That one because she's worth everything and even if in the end, she wasn't, taking the chance was better than waiting in the wings and doing nothing.
Yes, love, all messy and whatnot, scares me but I don't want to live my life paralyzed by fear. I don't want to protect my heart so much that I lock everyone out. Love is a gift from God and you should share it as much as you can.
As the song says, the wounds will mend, you'll get back on your feet and you will love again. You are not broken.

Thinking About Crazy Love

My fingers went black and numb thumbing through telephone pages looking for her number, the number I failed to get when I first saw her those many years during the summer before my junior year in college. I was in a special program in Washington, D.C., living and taking classes at Georgetown University and interning at a small newsletter. I was enjoying myself, basking in the heady world of D.C., the political version of Hollywood where I remember catching a glance of Al Gore, when he was vice-president.

One night, I saw her at some event at the Freedom Forum. I don't recall her name and her facial features are long embedded somewhere in my subconscious where I can't reach them. I do know that she was beautiful; in fact, she was fine, gorgeous, a physical manifestation of a tall drink of water flavored with spice. I managed to talk to her. I couldn't tell you how and I couldn't tell you what we talked about. I only hope I didn't sound like a fool. I think she smiled and may have laughed at my witticisms. Maybe, I'll say.

We did have a connection. We had both, at different times, attended a high-school journalism workshop that my hometown newspaper put on.

We parted ways after the event was over, and I left...without her number. I had no game, obviously. And the weight of a wasted opportunity dawned on me later when I had gotten back to the dorms at Georgetown. I knew I had to rectify this.

That's why I found myself going through the telephone book looking up her names and dialing the phone (this was in the age before IPhones, of course). I likened myself to be a Bob Woodward doing my own romantic investigation.

After about an hour, I got her number and I called and we talked. She wasn't annoyed. And I wasn't stupid enough to tell her all I had gone through to get to hear her voice, lest I be accused of stalking. In my mind, I was being persistent.

No, it didn't work out. It didn't even have much of a beginning for it not to work out. I don't think we even went out on a date, though I believe I did ask. My having no game caught up with me, pushing so hard that I seemed desperate. And no real woman wants a desperate man. I learned that the hard way.

Still, the lesson didn't sink in all the way because several years later, after I had graduated and settled into a small town for my first newspaper job, I caught wind of a girl who might like me. I didn't figure all this out until close to when she was graduating from the college where I met her while working on a story about an administrator there.

I got her number and called her. I didn't get her but instead left her a voice mail of me reciting a Langston Hughes poem. She called back, leaving a message. She seemed both flattered and somewhat flabbergasted. I don't think she knew what to do and she was leaving town anyway so she never called back. She fluttered away into that pile I was collecting categorized as lost opportunities.

Back then, I didn't know what I was doing. Some days, I wonder if I know now. But I knew what I wanted and went after it.

When we're young, we aren't always cautious. We're reckless, mistaking our youth for armor against pain and death. And our recklessness leads us down dark paths. But it also leads us onto other more wondrous paths. It leads us to love, or at least the possibility of love.

I think about romantic comedies and how they always end with someone running through an airport or traffic and end up standing in front of that one person, blurting out an eloquent yet jumbled speech about love and "you're the one for me" and "I can't live without you in my life." Then the two lovebirds live happily ever after.

But there's this poetry in how love makes us abandon reason and do some dumb shit. I mean, really dumb shit, like leaving Langston Hughes poems on someone's voice mail or refusing to hear the "no" in a woman's not calling you back after that first or second date. It's the warmth of their lips on yours feeling like a high you can't get enough of. The sound of their voice after a long day at work. Your hand on the small of their back being that home you two have built without the benefit of four walls.

Love is worth all of the crazy at the end and even if it breaks your heart a few times, it's worth going after again until you get it right.

So I guess I'm waiting for another chance to get my hands dirty.

Stressed Out

On a Sunday, I closed the door on a part of my life I had lived for the last 10 years. Turned in the key and didn't look back.
Days before my life had turned into a nightmare I wished I could wake up from. But this was life, not a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. And shit had just become real.
I've lived just long enough to know that things go wrong at the exact moment when everything seems to be going right, when the train is riding smoothly over the rails. Then this crappy thing happens and your world is in upheaval.
I wanted to scream, to pound my fists into some wall until holes appeared, to revert back to a child where I could throw a good old-fashioned temper tantrum.
But I'm an adult and I can't act like that anymore. I had to man up and handle my business. Inside, I was free-falling, not knowing where I would land.
I pushed through, trying to get my work done, trying not to worry about things I had no control over. I pushed to figure out what I needed to do now. I was performing triage on myself, prioritizing the mess my life was in at that moment.
Because you can't fix everything. You have to fix one thing and then move on to the next. And that's what I did.
But in those quiet moments, feelings of shame and embarrassment and downright anger creeped in and my body shook with that avalanche of emotion.
These are the moments when all you can form out of your mouth are the words, "Shit, shit, shit." Or that other word that rhymes with muck.
These are the moments you have those conversations with God. These are the moments you blame yourself for getting in this mess.
You fall deep into a depression but just before you hit that hard rock bottom, you realize you can't stay there.
I, sooner or later, figure that the only way to pull myself out is to pull myself out and reach out to friends to help me. Because these are also the moments when you realize that friendships matter and you can't conquer this all by yourself.
I remind myself constantly that it will be okay like a mantra, repeat it until I believe it through the very core of me, reverberating through every cell and every bone. It will be okay even when I don't see how it can be okay. It will be okay even when I can't find the door through which I will walk.
That Sunday, I closed the door on a part of my life. And I am walking through that other door that was always there even when I didn't see it.

In 20 Years

Twenty years ago is ancient history to me, concrete experience now dust to my now. But it was only 20 years ago, when I was a lanky kid into his second year of college, shoulders weighed down by the heavy book bag on my back. On my head was a dirty baseball hat pulled tight on my short Afro.
My eyeglasses were larger than the ones I have now and they fit awkwardly on my face. My face was clean-shaven except for a thin mustache.
I was both outsider and insider then, just beginning to flex my social muscles. I hated the taste of beer so when I went to fraternity parties, I refused to drink. Instead, I danced to the live bands playing in the basement and watched others get smashed.
I was two hours from home, thrilled with the freedom I had, feeling like a semi-adult, away from Mom. I loved staying up until the wee hours of the night. Of course, I paid for it the next day, groggy-headed, eyelids heavy with the sleep I should have gotten the night before but didn't.
I knew then what I wanted to do, even if I didn't know how I was going to do it. I wanted to be a journalist, work for a big paper and do big stories. I wanted to write.
How was I to know how hard it would all be? College was hard enough, the pressure of keeping my grades up, the doubt that crept into my mind from time to time of whether I was good enough to be here, my immaturity at times that threatened the friendships I had forged.
But life outside? I had no idea until two years later when I graduated and had to move out on my own, rent an apartment, figure out the non-existent work-life balance, paying bills, all the real adult shit my Mom told me about but I never did until now.
And in the time between then and now, from 20 to a few days shy of 40, life has changed me and I have changed with it. I have hurt people I said I cared about and I have been hurt to the core by others. I have made mind-numbing mistakes. I lost a job I wasn't ready for and had to rebuild my crumbled self-esteem bit by bit. I have stumbled my way through relationships like some blindfolded fool who doesn't realize he could have taken the folds off at any time.
These days, the glasses are smaller and circular. Little strands of white bleed through my mostly black goatee and mustache. I am still thin but the flesh is flabbier in places. I enjoy a glass of red wine every now and then or a bottle of Corona with lime. I dance more and poetry seeps from nearly every pore of my body. I am the writer I always thought I could be, and I am not finished writing yet.
I found that getting to the places I dreamed about was harder than I ever imagined but the path I took led me to places I never would have imagined and to people I would never want to vanish from my life.
I know now that the hardest thing is to own your life, own all of it. You can't own half of it; you can't just remember the laughter and the joy and the sweet caresses of some long-lost girlfriend. You also have to remember the mistakes and the pain and the heartache. All of your life made you who you are. All of it.
The cracks of my skin make me beautiful.
In the past year, I've been thinking about what turning 40 will be like. I think about what the next 20 years will mean. And sometimes, I get scared. We all do. Because you can't predict what will happen. You can't see the next possible disaster around the corner. You also can't see the next bit of happiness around the corner.
But I figure that I'll own whatever comes next just as I've owned everything that has come before.
If I could tell my 20-year-old self anything, I would tell him, "You're built for this. You always were." And I feel that my 60-year-old self is reminding me of that at this very moment as I write this.
You were built for this. You always were. And you always will be.

Writing my own name

My mirror was smudged and no matter how much Windex I sprayed, I could never get a clear image of myself.
All I could see was what others saw of me and much of that in my childhood was ugly. My box-shaped glasses sat akward on my acne-scarred face. My hair was a nappy Afro mess. And my clothes were no where near fashionable and I still cringe at the rainbow Hammer-like pants I once wore in high school.
But this was more than the clothes I wore or my glasses or the nasty pimples dotting my face. I wished I was someone else because I was not comfortable about being me. I hated me. I prayed to God I was cooler and was the guy girls drooled over like women do over Idris Elba these days.
I wanted to be the man. The man who got all the girls, who knew the smooth words to say to make the hot girl in class I had a crush on smile in my direction.
I wanted to be the man who didn't run from a fight. I wanted to be the one who others were afraid to mess with, whose very demeanor made others tremble like earthquakes.
I was trying to forge out what being a man was all about. My father wasn't around so I searched in church, school and hip-hop for representations I could copy.
The messages were confusing, as smudged as that mirror in my home. Could I be sensitive or should I be Mr. Tough? Hard as a rock. A roughneck, as MC Lyte once rapped.
I sure couldn't cry no matter how hurt I was from the teasing I sometimes got. I wasn't supposed to care that much, was I?
Then one day I smashed the mirror because the mirror was wrong to begin with. I just got another one, one that was clearer, that got rid of the smudges.
And I found that I was fine the way I was, without, of course, the box-glasses and the acne. I grew up into the person I was always meant to be. I had to get another view of myself, a view not fogged up with the perceptions and ideas of others, but one I forged for myself.
Never was I perfect but I wasn't meant to be. I wasn't supposed to be you and you weren't supposed to be me.
Superficial representations of masculinity are just that -- superficial. Trying as hard as you can to do the right thing is what makes you a man. Standing in the midst of chaos knowing that you will not die today is what makes you a man.
And daring to be who you are, with all your imperfections and mild obsessions, regardless of what others might say, is what makes you a man or woman. Being you is the difference between you embracing your humanity and absorbing into a commodified mass-produced death of corporatized proportions.
I am writing my name and no one else. Because no one else fits. Period.

I Look Like

I could say a lot but maybe you should just listen to what she has to say. She has a voice and so do you.

Still Standing

I remember when I had hit the brick wall my life had become -- when a friend I had written to told me she was worried about me. Until then, my life was a blur, a mindless routine. I had lost my job. My bank account was nearly empty and I wasn't having much luck finding a job, even though I put my car through hell on endless drives for interviews.
My apartment was a mess, and I didn't much care. I subsisted on music and books.
Adding to my misery was the beautiful woman who lived across from me. I had asked her out and things seemed to be going my way and then nothing. She shut me out over some incredibly stupid comment I made. Phone calls weren't returned; knocks on the door went unanswered.
We came and went without acknowledging each other's existence, and I was left with this aching guilt that I had messed up something that could have turned out to be good.
I felt like a failure and I couldn't at that point see anyway I could turn that failure into success. My friend could see that despair in the letters I wrote.
I could see it myself. I was in one of those dark places we all end up in at one time or another.
You replay your mistakes over and over, thinking if you could pinpoint the exact second things went sideways, you might have had a chance.
You don't think too much that maybe this is as it should be, that this was the way it was always supposed to go. You blame yourself because you don't know the difference between taking responsibility and pounding yourself in the ground.
At that moment, they are one and the same. And so you pound joy out of your life. You pound laughter out of your life. You pound the light out and live in utter and complete darkness.
Your life becomes your grave. You stop breathing consciously because your breathing has become less important.
In those moments, I don't think I ever really considered suicide. But does it really matter? Do you have to pull the trigger or take pills to decide you don't want to live anymore, that it's better to just accept the crappy circumstances life has thrown your way and give up?
I think I was in that place for a long time. We all sometimes get in that place. Some stay there for years. Others slap themselves awake.
I was there in that imagined grave for a few months until I found a job and moved out of that dingy apartment. You can say life got better.
But it didn't really. I got better. I got stronger. I realized that my life wasn't over just because things got dark for a little bit.
Sometimes, realizing that you're still standing is the first step to taking control of your life and finding the light that was always there just around the corner.
Standing means you can walk, and walking means you can walk out of the darkness. There is always a way out. Always.

Sometimes

Sometimes, life isn't how you like it. Life doesn't cooperate. Life doesn't do what you'd like it to do.
This is life, uncompromising, unwilling to shift to your high demands, incapable of bending to your will.
Life is that foggy cool morning when you lock the keys in your car and you curse as loud as you can, somehow hoping that the heavens will hear the insistent whine of your profanity and lend a hand. The heavens are deaf and life isn't fair.
And the day doesn't get any better because after paying a locksmith about $50 to unlock your car door, your computer gives you endless grief and the work phone is acting up and you wish the day would end already. Oh, it's Monday, by the way. And did I mention that the weather is miserable.
You take a moment in all of the frustrations building up inside you. You take a moment because you know if you don't, you'll scream and say that nasty thing you have wanted to say to that person you can't stand and this is the exact vulnerable time you're more apt to say that thing instead of keeping your mouth shut and your toxic thoughts from leaking out.
You take a moment because sometimes this life will beat you so that you want to throw a punch. Pound life senseless. Do your best Mike Tyson impression on the shitty day you've had so far.
You take a moment because you realize that life is longer and broader than this moment when everything seems aimed against you, when you feel God himself has decided that this is the day he will transform you into the 21st-century Job.
You take a moment because at this moment it ain't that serious. It never was. This is life and sometimes, life can suck the light out of you. Life can bend you so far you feel like you might break.
You take a moment to listen to the beating of your heart, feel the cold air prickling your skin and watch the greyness of the fog appear to hug the buildings in the downtown skyline.
Life isn't some puppet you pull the strings on. Life isn't some toy you toss around. Life isn't a game that you try to win.
Life is that thing you live as best as you can, pushing past the bad times knowing that the good times are around the corner, that the joy is contained in the small moments.
Life is the rain of cars breaking down and supervisors pissing you off and disease ravishing your body and the prospect of death coming to claim you or loved ones. But life also is the sunshine in the face-to-face conversation with an old friend or the unexpected new friend you just made, the hard laughter that feels like your stomach is caving in, the exhilaration of dancing to the music of your own rapidly-beating heart. Life is the first second of the first moment that you realized you fell in love.
Life is in the living. And sometimes you just have to dive in knowing you don't always have to be in control.