So I sucked all those tears in and built a force field around me to protect me from those nasty verbal slings.
I decided I would be stoic like those tough guys in western movies I watched on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. I wanted to be a hard-rock, uncrackable, steel-chested. Words would bounce off me like bullets did Superman.
Of course, they didn't, sinking into me so deep that it took years before I knew I was bleeding.
The circumstances are vague. I was in the elementary school cafeteria. The other kids laughed at me, and frustration and rage fueled my tears. I had a full-blown temper tantrum because back then, I had no words to describe my pain, my social awkwardness, my sense of outsiderness. I didn't feel I belonged and I couldn't figure out why.
But I knew what I had to do. I had to stop crying. I haven't cried since.
When the teasing came, I clenched my fists and held my tongue, imagined I was in another place than the one I was in, flying among the clouds and not feet first in the mud-slinging meanness of elementary school.
I didn't want to be a pussy. I wanted to be a man. I just didn't know what being a man really was.
In many ways, masculinity was confined to particular traits -- you were hard and you got a lot of pussy. You were "The Man." And if you weren't those things, you weren't much of a man.
But these were boys who were telling me this, boys who had as little clue about being a man as I did. I saw other examples too, examples that told me that intelligence and introspection were okay, that flashes of vulnerability were fine. It's those things that made me the man I am now, one I hope who can be vulnerable, can show empathy, who tries not to hurt the people I love.
Maybe this is why I keep coming back to the film "Moonlight." I see bits of myself in Chiron.
Chiron was me and he wasn't me. He and I shared the struggle of figuring out who we were and how we could be who we were in a world that rejected us. How could we be vulnerable in a place that demanded a "buck if you knuck" attitude?
How could we be free?
From start to finish, "Moonlight" is liberating and heartbreaking in its depictions of black masculinity unmoored from easy stereotypes. Chiron and the people who inhabit his world are fully human in all the ways "fully human" means -- flawed, messy, complicated and ultimately beautiful.
The scene in which drug dealer Juan teaches Chiron ("Little Man") how to swim stands out. We witness a moment of tenderness, of love shown, of a man not just teaching a boy to swim but to withstand the shifty currents designed to drown him; Juan is teaching Chiron how to float, how to survive, how to live in a world that would love to see him six-feet deep.
And I also note the ending scene -- a fully-grown Chiron, one who, as he says, built himself from the ground up and now cuts an imposing figure in Georgia where he deals drugs, telling his childhood crush, Kevin, that Kevin is the only man who ever touched him. Imagine a life in which you only experience a sliver of true love before it evaporates in the facade you build to protect yourself.
Liberation and heartbreak are simultaneously evoked in that scene. As the film ends, we see a brief glimpse of Kevin holding Chiron. It is a moment and we don't know how long it will last.
"Moonlight" leaves you with questions about where Chiron will go after this. But we do know -- Chiron will go back to Georgia and he will hide himself in order to keep breathing in the world he knows now. Yet, maybe, we hope, he finds freedom in that moment, that he will hold close this memory of a time where he could truly be himself and that memory will push him to seek the light of the moon where he can shine bright.
I like to think we all are trying to get into that moonlight, to shake off whatever is binding us from being and loving who we are boldly and gloriously.
