The Now of It

The nights before COVID are a blur of moments. In those days, which were only months ago, I had a fairly predictable routine during the later part of the week -- dinner at a restaurant where I sat alone at the bar, catching up on a TV show I had missed the night before or reading a book, then upon finishing, I would venture down to one or two of my favorite bars. The bar I always ended the night with was Single Brothers, where the bartenders knew exactly what I wanted -- a healthy pour of Carbernet or a Tecate with lime. 

That was the predictable part. The unpredictable part was who I would see and who I would engage with that night that would stretch on for hours. It could very well be a boring night. It could well be a night where I danced near the front of the bar or talked the night away with some of my favorite people or strangers I happened to meet and connect with. 

Daylight hours during the weekend would find me at a bookstore or coffee shop, catching up on reading. On Sundays, I might wander the downtown streets, mentally preparing for the Monday to come.

And sometime that weekend, I might venture to the movie theater to either watch an explosion-filled, reality-escaping blockbuster or settle into quietly disturbing drama (I keep telling people I don't do animated movies). 

Those days are gone, and I am in mourning. More than a month a stay-at-home order was imposed, and nearly two months after restaurants and bars were shut down, the grief over what has vanished seemingly overnight comes at me in waves. 

The escape hatches are gone. The places where I sought refuge from the world are closed. Not all of them, of course. I have access to wine. I can Netflix and chill. I still have a job. 

But the moments of spontaneity -- those fleeting times where I didn't know where the night would take me -- are hard to find these days. Those nights where I had a plan and that plan was disrupted by seeing a friend and that friend and I would talk and dance for hours, sweating out our stress and leaving it on the dance floor. The nights where I would yammer about religion and politics and religion and books over wine while old-school R&B played in the background of some bar. The nights when one certain friend would send out the Bat signal and we would head to where he was on the music and we would lose our minds until 2 in the morning. 

Moments like that don't last forever, but you never think they would stop being possible all of a sudden. You never thought that your nights, as predictable as they could be, would become so predictable because you're limited in where you can go and what you can do. 

My nights are now confined to my apartment, and it's not the same.

I am practicing cautious optimism. I'm telling myself that everything will be okay, even as the news doesn't give you much to be optimistic about. My faith tells me that it is about what I can't see and not what I can see that I should hang my hopes on. 

Still, I am in mourning.

I haven't hugged or kissed anyone in more than a month and it hurts not to have that. Hurts not to be able to put your arm around someone. One of my friends would hug me hard every time he saw me. I have another friend who would hold my hand. She loves touching the people she loves. And now we can't touch. 

I am luckier than others. I have found glimmers of hope. I've texted people and called people. Because of my job, I still go into the office and cover things. My job has kept me busy, and I have a job when others I know don't. 

I know I have certain privileges than others, and the stresses I have don't match the ones others have. 

It doesn't change the fact that this is hard. And it will continue to be hard, even though I know at least for now, this is necessary to save as many lives as possible. 

I try to remember that the future is not set in stone. It never was. I can't bank on either a best-case scenario or a worst-case scenario. This will play out exactly as it plays out. And I have to believe that there is an other side to this. You just have to take it one day at a time. 

And one day, I will get back to those nights that were a blur and cherish them even more. 

Moonlight

I stopped shedding tears in elementary school. I must have been around nine or 10. Maybe younger. All I knew then was crying didn't help me. Watery eyes just made the teasing worse.
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.

Alright

Fuck 2016. Many of my friends are saying that. I've said it myself many times this year. I mean, Prince died this year. 2016 has sucked for me and many of my friends who have had to deal with personal loss and challenges.
This is the year I found out I had glaucoma, and it has been a hell of an adjustment. I had laser surgeries on both of my eyes to relieve the eye pressure and I now take three types of eye drops -- two in the morning, one in the afternoon and three in the early evening.
I have a glaucoma specialist and a retina specialist. For weeks, I had the not-so irrational fear that I had a retinal detachment. I kept worrying that all these eye drops I was taking and the laser surgery would not work and I would go blind and lose my independence.
I tried to stay positive and sometimes it worked. Sometimes, it didn't and I'd find myself burrowing down the rabbit hole of worst-case scenarios and what-ifs. I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking that I saw flashes, a symptom of retinal detachment. I would make an appointment to check it out and discover that nothing was wrong.
That reassurance wouldn't reassure me. I would go right back to worrying, right back to thinking that something horrible would happen. I sought out help. I joined an online support group for people who have eye diseases like glaucoma. I held on to my faith.
What people don't tell you is that staying positive and having faith is not easy. It's like pushing a boulder up a mountain, your muscles buckling against the pressure and your legs are about to give out. It's like running an 800-meter race, like I did in high school, and finding that second lap is akin to running into a wall. Your lungs are screaming at you and you feel as if you'll faint. You want so much to just stop right then and there. Just fall down and sleep. It would be so much easier.
The hardest part of dealing with a chronic illness is knowing that it's not going anywhere. All you can do is manage it and make sure that the disease doesn't do further damage to your eyes. That's where the laser surgery and the eye drops come in. I have to take those eye drops no matter what. I have to keep up with my medication and get refills when I need them. Not taking my eye drops is not an option.
Fear, in part, drives me. I don't want to go blind. I don't want to lose my independence. I don't want to stop driving. What I do for a living -- writing and reporting -- requires my ability to observe the world around me in detail, the kind of details most people don't notice. I'm always watching the way bodies move through the world, how some seem to float and others stumble. How time tightens in some places and loosens in others. How hips that once shook with vigor now creak when bending.
The world is beautiful, even when it's ugly and I want to see it for as long as I can, and I'm afraid that one day I won't.
To lose your ability to move in the world the way you want to is even scarier, to me, than death.
I think these days about my own fears and the fears I and others have since Nov. 8 happened. The campaign and election  of a man I won't name here has ushered in a long-buried hate that has found a new boldness, and I see dark days ahead. It's scary, just as much as what I've been dealing with is scary to me.
It's scary because so much is uncertain. I don't know what the future holds. I just don't. Movies have happy endings, but that's not a guarantee in life. People die alone. Some people never overcome their addictions. Good men and women are murdered every day for no reason at all, and their loved ones are left to wonder why.
It feels these days as if the assholes have won.
But I know that tomorrow, I will take my eye drops. I will close my eyes for a few minutes, as if in prayer, as I let each drop soak in before I put the next drop in. And I will do it again and again because I have to.
Fear drives me, but I am trying to hold the fear at bay. I am trying to remember that I cannot be paralyzed by fear. Because if that happens, I become blind to those moments of bliss that fill my life, the friends and family I have, the job I cherish, the music I listen to and dance to. I forget to see everything else that is around me that is good.
It's not all right but it is. Fuck 2016 but 2016 taught me grand lessons on what it means to be human. That not every day feels good but me being alive is good.
2016 is a piece of a large puzzle that we haven't seen yet. I can't judge my life based on one year or even five. I never know what good is coming around the corner.
Or bad. The only thing I can do is concentrate on what I have right in front of me, and it looks pretty damn good.

Seeing

A month ago, I found out I had glaucoma. And it was advanced enough that I had some vision loss, all peripheral. I felt unmoored when I got the news.
I also felt tremendous guilt. It had been years since my last visit to the eye doctor. I decided late last year to rectify that. One visit turned into two and then into three and finally a referral to a glaucoma specialist. Then one day in April, after two and a half hours of various eye tests, the doctor gave me the bad news.
I cursed. The good news was that even as advanced as it was, it was treatable. My eye doctor gave me two prescriptions for eye drops. I needed to take this medication for as long as I live to stave off blindness.
I wasn't just scared. I was petrified. I am a writer and a reporter and my observations are a crucial part of the toolbox I use. I am constantly looking for details, the smaller the better. I watch body movements, facial tics, hands that wipe away tears. I listen for the tremble in a person's voice. I know when someone is lying. I know when someone is hiding something. I know when bullshit is flying my way and how to duck.
Seeing is everything.
The doctor said that if I hadn't come in when I did, I would have awakened one day and I would have been blind.
Every day since has been adapting to a new reality and trying to find the balance between being sufficiently worried and straight freaking out. Some days, the line is razor thin.
About a week ago, I went right over the line into panic. Because I have glaucoma and am near-sighted, my doctor told me I'm at greater risk for something called retinal detachment, which is considered a medical emergency. If you don't get help immediately, you could lose a substantial amount of your vision.
I feared that was happening and that led me to an early morning visit with the eye doctor, two weeks before my follow-up. My doctor thoroughly examined my eyes and found no retinal tears or detachment.
I breathed a sigh of relief, but it was fleeting. I fear the medication isn't working. I fear that one day, I will not see and I will lose my cherished independence. I've been on my own since I stepped onto a college campus more than 20 years ago. I hate the idea of depending on anyone for my day-to-day.
No doubt I have had help along the way. No doubt I have had situations where I reached out for help and friends stepped in.
But I like driving my own car and deciding when and where I will be at any given time. I like taking long walks downtown.
I like wandering. I like seeing the eyes of the people I talk to. I like seeing people smile, how the shapes of people's faces change from one emotion to another, how brows furrow, mouths curl and widen, eyes lighten and darken.
And the nights I'm blessed to be in the company of a woman who wants to be with me, I love to see the shape of that woman's breasts and the spread of her thighs and everything in between.
I fear losing all of that. It is an irrational fear. But many fears are irrational. They don't bend to logic, as much as I try. They don't fade, as much as I try to push them away.
They sneak into my subconscious and I wake up in the middle of the night, my pulse pounding.
I breathe in and out, calm my nerves.
I remind myself that I can still see. I remind myself that I see even more in my dreams and in my imagination.
That the journey to get here was not just by physical sight. That I never could see the curves up ahead that popped up out of nowhere. I didn't see the dips and bumps in the road that made me stumble and fall. I never saw that cliff until it was right up on me.
I never saw the glaucoma that I was diagnosed with until a month ago.
Some shit you just aren't going to see. And there is some shit in the future that I won't see.
The brutal truth is we're all blind. Always were. Always will be. We're blind to the future. We're blind to the past that we don't want to face. We're blind to our faults, the hurt we have caused others, the hurt we cause ourselves. We lie to ourselves too much.
We think we're perfect and invincible and that if anything out of the ordinary happens, it's unfair. We don't really believe in the cliche that life isn't fair.
We're human and being human is messy.
I'm learning to live with this. I'm learning to push the negative thoughts out of my mind and tell myself of all the good things I do have.
I'm not blind. I can see. And what I see is beautiful. I see friends who love me. I see moments of light in darkness. I see myself dancing to pulsating music and I see myself writing poems and I see good people in a world full of ugliness and hate.
I see myself in a mirror, crisp and clear, still standing, still breathing, still here. I see this is enough to rejoice in.

My Tribe

From fifth-grade through high school, large-framed glasses engulfed the upper portion of my face. My fashion sense was non-existent. In high school, I ran to homeroom every morning -- backwards. Greek myths were my obsession, to the point that I loathed hearing anyone say Hercules because I knew that was his Roman name and his Greek name was Heracles. I loved Voltron and Kung-Fu movies and Transformers.
I was a geek. But I was not a proud geek. When you're growing up, being a geek isn't considered cool. You want to blend in, not stand out. At least that's what it was for me. Because when you're different and you stand out, you become a target. You get teased.
You're not cool.
And I, like any other kid, wanted desperately to be cool. Get the daps while walking through school. Have the hot girls look at you like you could get it if you talked to them. In fact, you could get it without saying a word.
But I wasn't cool. Not then.
Until I discovered A Tribe Called Quest and discovered I had always been cool. I just didn't know it.
Didn't believe it.
I didn't find A Tribe Called Quest until the group's second album, The Low End Theory, came out in 1991. I don't know where I bought it. I had heard the group's hit, "Check The Rhyme," and "Scenario."
I popped the cassette into the tape deck and pressed played. I never pressed fast-forward. Mostly, I rewound and listened again.
It's hard to say exactly what kept me listening over and over again until the tape had wore out. I could point to the jazz horns overtop the boom-bap beats. I could say I loved the back and forth between Q-Tip, the Abstract Poet, and Phife Dawg, that five-foot force of braggadocious swagger.
But more than anything, I honed in on the group's insistence on standing out when it would have been so much easier to blend. So much easier to do what everyone else in the rap game was doing.
But A Tribe Called Quest, part of the Native Tongue family, was all about originality.
Listening to Phife Dawg, Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and maybe Jarobi taught me that I was cool the way I was. I didn't have to blend in.
I didn't have to water myself down to make others comfortable.
A Tribe Called Quest was the soundtrack to my childhood, more than any other group. I memorized the lyrics to the songs, bumped my head to the beats, and just absorbed the love that boomed from each of the group's albums.
I recognized that the voices in my head were urging me to be myself and never follow someone else.
Since Phife Dawg died at age 45 last month, I've been in a fog. And just this week, Prince, the one and only Prince, died.
Those two deaths have hit me hard. They taught me the greatest lesson -- being you is enough. Trying to be someone else only leads to cracks in the mirror.
I am wrapped in a beautiful skin, a God-given skin that no one else has, a skin I was destined to be in. And it's fine the way it is. That's hard when people around you reject you for who you are. When people turn their backs on you for refusing to walk the same path but decide to choose the other road, the less traveled one that might lead to joys unseen.
That's tough. But what helps is finding out that other people have traveled that lonely path and you realize it's not that lonely. And they lived and they thrived and they found that voice inside themselves that the world needed to hear.
Both men were famously short but the loudest and most impactful voices come in small packages.
As I grow older, I realize that the people I love the most will part from this world. I know that I will be surrounded by the spirits of those who are no longer here. And my heart will grieve for the empty space where the body I hugged and face I smiled at used to be.
I never knew or met Prince and Phife Dawg but the legacy they left is expansive.
That kid with the large-framed eyeglasses who ran backwards to homeroom is now a man who has grabbed hold of that long-hidden cool and owned it.
And I've found my tribe of quirky, geeky friends and family. A Tribe Called Quest taught me there were more of us out there than I even imagined.
We're about to take over the world.

Losing My Religion

I stopped going to church 10 months ago and haven't been back since. I don't have many regrets, except that it took me so long to leave. It's one of the biggest changes I made last year.
For so long, attending church was something I did, without fail, every Sunday. I sang in the choir and attended Bible study. And those years I went to church, I strengthened my faith. I had something to hold onto when life got dark and I couldn't find the light switch. Church reminded me that the storm wasn't going to last long and that joy came in the midnight hour.
I needed that mustard-seed faith. It was then, when I was at my lowest, I was able to pull myself out of the deep end of the pool.
And even though I don't go to church, I believe in God. I believe in a God who performs miracles and who exemplifies love in the grandest sense of the word. I chose to believe that love conquers hate and that though the world appears clogged with evil, good still flourishes; you just have to see it.
But despite everything I got from going to church, I ignored too long this feeling in my spirit that this no longer fit who I wanted to be and the values I wanted to reflect. I wasn't being me.
I was pretending. I was performing what I thought was Christianity. I was doing all of these things to assauge guilt and fulfill some obligation.
And somewhere along the way, I lost sight of God.
To be more exact, I didn't see God in church. I felt ashamed. The theology I heard was exclusive and not inclusive. And I couldn't pretend that I agreed with it anymore.
I left and never looked back, even though I still have friends there I love and respect and cherish.
Every now and then, I run into people who ask why I haven't been to church in awhile. I don't say much. I evade the question in a way because I really don't want to explain. I don't want get into a long and drawn-out discussion. I left and that's all there is to say.
But obviously that isn't all there is to say.
I know I believe in God. Am I a Christian? I can't say. I'm trying to figure it all out. I'm asking questions of myself about what I really believe.
Will I go back to church? I don't know. I'm walking the path day by day and seeing where it will take me. I'm trying to trust this process of getting to a more holistic truth.
I figure it is better to get lost than to be stuck in a place that doesn't feel like home anymore, doesn't feel like you anymore.
I have a feeling I'll find my way out soon.

Me and the World

As I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' book, Between The World and Me, all I could think about was myth. Through his blog at The Atlantic and in this book, Coates' work has always been about dismantling myth and confronting uncomfortable truths. In his mind, myth can be and often is dangerous.
American history can be myth. Many have a simplistic view of history, one with good guys and bad guys, and the good guys always win. Essentially, American history, as it plays out in the mainstream, is an action movie.
But in real life, the good guy doesn't always win, and sometimes the good guy can do some pretty horrendous things.
Coates' book is a letter to his 15-year-old son, who is upset that Darren Wilson won't be held criminally accountable for fatally shooting Michael Brown on Aug. 9, 2014, an incident that helped sparked the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. Coates doesn't offer comfort. He believes his job as a father isn't to comfort but to clearly delineate for his son what the world is, not what he hopes it would be.
It's again his attempt to strip away myth and lay bare the truth of America's founding on white supremacy. For all the good of the U.S. Constitution and American democracy, it is severely limited, in Coates' mind, by the persistence of racism that is indelibly entrenched in Amerian soil.
And Coates doesn't have much hope that things will get considerably better anytime soon, if ever.
Suffice it to say, Coates' book is a downer, for the most part, with slivers of hope and happiness in his exhortation to his son to continue struggling and in his description of his time at Howard University.
There's no doubt that Coates' take is based on his specific experiences. Some have criticized Coates for his unrelenting bleakness.
I actually don't mind. Coates is a writer and he doesn't owe you or anyone else a happy ending. He is not required to make you feel good. Let's not forget that Biggie Smalls' first record, "Ready to Die," ends with Biggie committing suicide.
His is a personal tale of his journey as clear-eyed as he can write it about what it means to be a black man today. His book is at times eloquent and at times exhausting.
Some have compared him to James Baldwin. Coates set up that comparison from the beginning because he was trying to approximate something in the styyle and substance of what Baldwin achieved in The Fire Next Time.
It doesn't take anything away from Coates to say Coates is no Baldwin nor should he be. Coates should be allowed to stake his own claim.
Truth is, Coates didn't knock me out with this book. Maybe that's because nothing contained within its pages particularly shocked me. Some of what he said only confirmed what I have experienced as a black man. But I'm not a father and I didn't grow up in Baltimore so our experiences are at points, similar, and at points, vastly different.
As short as it was, the book often ran the danger of being repetitious. I got tired of seeing "body" and "plunder" so many times. Those words lost their poetic effectiveness after awhile.
It was the theme of cutting away myth that spoke to me most powerfully. You see the origin of that motivation duirng his time at Howard, where he shifted from his obsession with Afrocentric texts, such as Chancellor Williams' The Destruction of Black Civilization to a more nuanced understanding of African and African-American history sparked by the challenge of his Howard University professors.
His takeaway is that history is not designed to make you feel good. You have to grapple with some hard things. There were great African civilizations, but some of those kings and queens we praise did some despicable things. Just as many of those Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, created a marvelous document in the U.S. Constitution, but also owned human beings as property.
One major criticism I've seen of the book is that it minimizes black women. This essay is a pretty good summary of that critique. I think, for me, it comes down to the space we allow for black women to tell their stories.. That space is often narrow. It is also about the ways in which we continually priortize the experiences of black men over that of black women.
Coates is considered one of the most eloquent voices on the issue of race. But there are other voices out there who don't get the big platform a writer for The Atlantic gets. Kiese Laymon and Brittney Cooper and Candice Marie Benbow and Roxane Gay are doing some dynamic work. I want those voices to get a wider platform because if you think you're in the know because you just read Coates, you are seriously mistaken. That's another myth that needs to be dismantled.
Some myths are good. Some of my favorite are the Greek myths I obsessed over as a child. The stories were filled with nuanced characters and melodrama. These were superhumans who found themselves confounded and twisted by flesh-and-blood concerns. The myths could reveal a truth that is not based solely in fact.
But other myths just muddy the water. Those are the myths that Coates has dedicated himself to excavating, ripping apart and throwing away. Because if you can't see the cracks in the walls, you won't know that the house needs fixing. 

Black Messiah

I had waited for years for D'Angelo's new record to never drop. For me, his 2000 record, Voodoo, was the musical equivalent of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a work of such incomprehensible genius and Grand Canyon-like ambitions that it could never be replicated. Ellison worked for years on another novel but died before he could complete it. After his death, we were left with the unpolished Juneteenth, and I never managed to read it.
Of course, Voodoo was D'Angelo's sophomore CD; his first was Brown Sugar, a laid-back head-nodding ode to love, full of hip-hop swagger and R&B vulnerability. But Voodoo was such a leap forward, with many songs edging beyond the traditional 4 minutes. D'Angelo, influenced by Prince and many others, cooked up a musical concoction of funk, blues, R&B, jazz and rock. The sound was grittier and looser, yet still highly structured. The album was slightly out-of-control passion, contained just at the moment it was bound to burst free.
The first time I heard Voodoo, I was mesmerized. The CD had a hypnotic power tied to an irresistible groove, one that ebbed and flowed. It wasn't an easy groove. D'Angelo and Questlove, of The Roots fame, had crafted a CD that was off-kilter. The beats didn't land exactly where you thought they would land.
Two of my favorite songs on that CD were "Greadayndamorning/Booty" and "Africa." The first was a gritty ditty about perserverence in the face of the daily grind that dovetailed smoothly at the end into a funky jam full of joy at the sight of a dawn promising new beginnings. And the latter, fueled by soft African drumming, is a powerful song in which D'Angelo sings about the importance of honoring his African ancestry and ensuring that history is passed down to his son.
Continued listenings only confirmed for me how much of a classic Voodoo was and remains. And in the 14 years since Voodoo came out, I had vague hopes that D'Angelo would record another CD of  equal power.
Doubt built upon doubt as I read of his legal troubles and his drug problems. Rumors came and went that he was working on a new CD called "James River," named aptly after the body of water near our native Richmond, Va. But nothing came. Music came out in snippets and videos of concerts he did over in Europe. And still nothing.
Until mid-December, when Black Messiah dropped Beyonce-like on iTunes. That Sunday night, I downloaded the album and put on my headphones. I found myself transfixed, lost in music I immediately loved but couldn't quite grasp.
Most CDs these days are nothing but radio-friendly singles bound together into one pre-packaged commodity ready for mass consumption. Black Messiah wasn't that.
It was a religious experience, one that washed over me in waves. His voice was blues-tinged that every now and then rose into Prince-like falsettos. As always, you struggled to understand him, the lyrics drowned in D'Angelo's melodic mumbles. "1,000 Deaths" is particularly emblematic of this problem.
Other times, he is clearer. And sometimes, it just doesn't matter. It's as if D'Angelo finds an eloquence in speaking in the tongues of his Pentacostal youth. In the song, "The Charade," he sings that "all we wanted was a chance to talk, 'stead we got outlined in chalk." The chorus, likely written way before the protests that sprung up around the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, feels precient, the voice of those too long silenced screaming to be heard.
D'Angelo said in the liner notes that Black Messiah doesn't refer to him; he's no God. But we can all be the Messiahs for the world we live in, tapping into our own power to effect the kind of change we want to see. And the greatest power we have, I think D'Angelo is saying, is love.
Love infuses every song here in all kinds of forms -- sensual and romantic love, love for community, love for the wider world in which we all live, love for the divine.
It's all there in the grooves of the songs, just as loose as on Voodoo. But the songs are shorter, not as jammy, and it feels a bit more cohesive.
I can't decide yet whether Black Messiah is better than Voodoo or just in the same vein. I think it is.
The CD is a reminder for me that art doesn't mean much if it comes easy. Art is greatest when you labor on it, put the time in, make sure all the ingredients are there and thoroughly cooked. Art means you risk the people not loving it because at the end of the day you have to write the story you need to write, push out the truth of what you want to say in as naked a way as possible. Because your aim is not to be popular, not to be what's in, but to be the next thing, the thing that no one had ever thought to be until you put you into the world.
And that's why I love Black Messiah, for this moment in time. D'Angelo went through whatever he went through for 14 years and came back out on the other end to create something beautiful out of the joy and the pain, the dreams and the nightmares, the light and the dark, of his eternal soul.
This is resurrection music, revolution embodied in the notion that no one ever really dies, because resurrection happens all the time.

Grateful

I am learning to make room for life because I have realized that life is grander than the limitations I give it.
Let me explain.
A couple of weeks ago, I celebrated a birthday. I invited a bunch of people to a place I was already planning to go anyway, a nice little spot that has a DJ every Thursday. At the kind behest of a friend, I created a Facebook event and invited some people and let other people invite themselves. It was a grand event. I danced and people bought me drinks to consume. The next day I was full of exhaustion and needed a couple of naps to get back to normal functionality.
But it was all worth it because life is grander than the limitations I give it.
Let me explain.
I live in fear of things going horribly wrong. It is irrational and I try to live by logic. But just because it makes no sense does not make the fear any less real. It is the kind of fear that creeps up at night as you lie in bed. It tickles at the edges of your thoughts and worms its way into the middle. You try to swap it away like some incessant fly but it keeps coming back.
I fear dying from a horrible disease. I fear a loved one dying from a horrible disease. I fear everything in my life falling apart. I fear that I will never find true love. I fear that once I find true love, it will hurt me beyond my imagining.
The good thing is I hide my fear well. I keep it tucked away. I look to my faith that in the end, I will be fine, that things will work out. I remind myself that my fear of what might happen does not guarantee that it will happen. I remember that a moment of bad does not equal the totality of what my life will eventually become.
But it is hard. That is where gratefulness comes in. That night, the night of my birthday celebration, I smiled at those who showed up. I had lots of hugs. I danced with beautiful women. I smiled that goofy smile of mine.
The celebration that night was a celebration of all the good things I had -- friends who pulled me through the tough times and listened patiently to my rantings, the roof over my head, the job that at times frustrates the hell out of me but I love nonetheless because it allows me to put pen to pad on a daily basis, the salsa dancing and the poetry and the joy of knowing and engaging with a wide range of really cool people.
I'm grateful for every hard shift of my life because it shaped me into who I am today. But I'm still learning to make room, to shed some of that fear because it is still there, keeping me from leaping full-fledged into everything that should be in store for me.
As open as I believe myself to be, I know that I have walls to keep some stuff out, tiny obstacles I subconsciously put into place to ensure some things don't transpire. One of my friends, the same one who urged me to put up that Facebook event, gently and lovingly reminded me of those obstacles.
Seeing yourself is a tough thing. You want to see yourself as always the good guy, the nice guy, the noble hero.
But the truth is you're not the hero of your story; you're not the villain either. You're you and parts of you are ugly and nasty. I'm not a nice guy. I can be an asshole. I'm capable of hurting people. We all are. It is what makes us human.
And knowing that makes me humble; it makes me grateful; it grounds me in who I am and who I could become if I just make room for life because life is so much grander than the limitations I give it. It always was.

Happy

Happy is hard. Happy is a journey and the smile on my face doesn't tell you the whole story.
It doesn't tell you the times I wanted to end it all, when I couldn't see tomorrow's sun through today's rain.
I remember when it was dark and I couldn't find a flashlight or a light switch. I wrote a letter to a friend and she called me because the words I wrote were so dark that she was worried.
I may smile today but yesterday I almost cussed someone out for no reason. I slammed my fists into the steering wheel of my car in the parking lot. I screamed until my throat was raw in my apartment.
You don't realize how hard happy can be until the twists and turns of life gut-punch you into some crazy sort of oblivion.
As a friend described it, things can get so hairy that you just stop and tell God, "Okay, let me watch you work all this out and just be entertained." Because that's when you reached the limit of what you can do.
I think happy is a choice you have to make every day because happy is an insane belief that even if you can't see the light, it's there, like a sun peeking behind clouds, like a rainbow appearing after a horrific storm.
The smile on my face doesn't tell you how scared I am of dying, of losing everything I ever had in one fell swoop, of having someone close to me die, of being consumed by so much pain and grief that you can barely get out of bed when daylight breaks.
Life is some scary shit, I tell you.
And happy isn't easy. But you have to push through. Feel the pain and come out the other end because there is another side.
I have lived at least long enough to see that storms are temporary and that you cannot view all of your life in the one moment that seems like the end. Because it isn't the end. You're still breathing. Your eyes continue to open. This is only a chapter to a much larger book in which only God knows the ending.
You're just here for the ride.
That's why I cherish the moments, whether loud with laughter or quiet and reflective.  I smile because the tears and anger and hurt made me who I am. I smile because I'm still standing and my heart is beating. And I choose to believe that despite all the bad news around me, all the horrific stuff I cover as a reporter, love wins in the end. Hate loses.
I choose to believe that happiness is the truth.

The Words I Leave

I can't really remember when I discovered the magic of poetry but I like to think it happened in the wrinkled pages of Dudley Randall's anthology The Black Poets. There in those pages is where I found Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown and Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, who was searching for the sacred words to prevent destruction and usher in resurrection. Truth is his words, the ones I recited out loud at night in my dorm room at the predominantly white university I attended, were the sacred words that saved my life. Literally saved my life, and I'm sure the lives of many others in years before I existed and in years after.
I had already devoured James Baldwin and because of him, I knew I wanted to be a writer. But poetry? I didn't quite understand it. Couldn't get my head around it, though I loved Edgar Allen Poe and Robert Frost. But I was trying to sing my song and I was searching desperately for voices that could harmonize with mine.
Baraka was one of those poets whose voice I tried to sing until I could sing on my own. I relished his words coming out of my mouth because they felt beautiful. They felt like love.
And I was looking for love. I was looking for black love in a white world that felt cold sometimes on that campus, a place where when I spoke, things came out discordant to others and I ended up confused. I was trying to speak my world to those who denied my world even existed.
During my sophomore year, I attended a lecture. This was a time of great debate about political correctness and multiculturalism. One of the other black students had tried to petition for a black studies major on campus. And here I sat, the only black student, if I remember, among a sea of white faces, listening to a white guy whose name I can't remember talk about the wonders of Western Civilization. He was saying something in the way about how teaching black history would just make black people angry and institute victimhood and how white males had been pilloried and debased in the ongoing debates about multiculturalism. I found it ironic that he was accusing black people of playing the victim card while playing the victim card himself. I also found it strange that he could find no place in his intellectual argument for the contributions of black people. Our literature wasn't good enough, he seemed to be saying.
Whatever because I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew I came from a history of writers because I knew Baraka. So I went back to The Black Poets and other things and sought the beauty in the language, our language, the language I wanted to be a part of, if I could just find my voice. Harmonize.
I wanted to be a poet.
The years I first discovered Baraka, I also discovered people like Jessica Care Moore and Saul Williams and I wanted to grab hold of the stage and spit fire like they did. But they weren't me and so I typed up bullshit on the computer right before an open mic and dared to call it poetry.
I took a creative writing class and wrote self-righteous rants and called it poetry until a poetry friend of mine told me to read Langston Hughes a little more closely, see that he wrote out of his own experience, that his power came not from how much he shouted but in how much he found joy even when there was pain.
I wrote poetry on and off for much of my adult life, some of it good, some of it awful. I kept writing and I kept reading tons of anthologies and I would read Baraka's poem, "Ka'Ba."
I could say that I was drawn to Baraka for his anger but he wasn't just angry for anger's sake. He was an artist who cultivated his anger to make work that was powerful. He was trying to say something in the way of things in a way that we could hear. Because he wanted us to hear.
And I heard.
Baraka was a complex man, one whose views I sometimes disagreed with. But I think he loved a world that could be better. He left behind words I cleave to because there's love tangled in those words.
I am a poet. I can say that now, after years of pretending to be something else. And I've found my voice, after years of singing with others, and now marching out on my own.
I think, like him, I'm trying to use my words to paint a better world, leave things a bit brighter than when I got here.

A New Day

I cleaned my car out recently. It was really an excavation of everything I had accumulated but forgot was there.
Junk piles up quick if you let it. And I did for quite a long time. People who know me aren't shocked by this. They know I can be disorganized. Plus, I'm a journalist. Journalists are supposed to be mad disorganized.
Yep, that's my excuse.
But sometimes, you get tired of seeing the junk so you take an hour or so and just clear things out. Then after it's all said and done, you sit in your car and all of a sudden, you feel a lightness in the emptiness of your car.
You feel good and a smile breaks out on your face.
Besides, you can then see the long view. Take a gander at the mountains and valleys in your path of sight. Figure out how you're going to get from here to there.
Because that's the point. Clear everything out so you can have a clearer view of your life and more importantly, a clearer view of you.
Life moves fast, if we let it. We allow ourselves to be governed by time and appointments and sundry things to do that are on our ever-evolving to-do list.
And the next thing you know, a year has gone by and you still haven't done half of what you said you were going to do. 
Friendships have dissipated. Rain and sunshine have come and gone and you're so bogged down you have forgotten what fresh air feels like.
All because you haven't cleaned out the junk. You can't enjoy the quiet that creates its own music you can dance to.
So I cleaned out my car recently. Trashed the trash. Found some stuff I had forgotten was there. Excavated songs I wanted to learn to sing again.
There's not much you can do about the time you lost. You only have control over the time you have now. Me, I'm looking at mountains and valleys today, trying to find my way from here to there. And the view is pretty beautiful.

Fatheralong

I had no father when I was growing up, but that's a song that's been sung far too many times. It is a tale told too frequently from the lips of black men.
It's almost cliche now, but the cliche, in my case, is also the truth: I grew up without a father. I was raised by a single mother.
And I tried to forge a definition of manhood without a dictionary.
But I want to tell a different story. I want to tell the story of the man I am, not the man who wasn't there. I want to create a new narrative.
That narrative begins and ends with the last time I saw my father. In 2008, I was home for Thanksgiving and for some reason, my mother and I got on the subject of Dad. I think I asked her where he was and she somehow got the idea that we should look for him.
The next day we went to an uncle on his side of the family. He pointed us to some house where he rented a room.
He wasn't there when we first came by. We returned hours later and there he was. I had forgotten how he looked. He was about my size, except for a beer belly. He was taller and his face bore the ravages of time. He was old.
My mother sat, made small talk. A part of me didn't want small talk. I wanted a confrontation. I wanted to ask why he wasn't there to do all the things you think a father should show his son. I wanted to know why I had to figure out how to be a man all by myself.
I never had that conversation. I asked a few questions and we bounced, me shaking his hand as we left. I gave him my phone number and address with vague promises of getting back in touch.
But I knew that wasn't going to happen. We haven't talked since.
I realized later that I never needed that big confrontation, that moment where I aired all of my feelings out in dramatic fashion, like out of some movie. I just needed to see him.
And in seeing him, I saw that he could never have taught me how to be a man because he never learned himself.
He was broken in so many pieces that I wondered how he could have molded me into a man.
My motivation was that I was not going to be him. I searched for examples of other men in my life and found them.
I put them all together and here I am.
The biggest issue for me was trying to figure out where I fit in. I had to fight all these perceptions I had of what a man was supposed to be.
Pussies cry. Men fight. Strength was in how hard you were, how tough you could be, how long you stood in the face of battle.
Punks wimped out.
I was the nerd battling acne, my head in books, introverted. Not the all-star, muscular athlete kicking ass on the field.
But those are surface definitions. Stereotypes based on myth.
I had to write my own definition, one based on who I am and who I wanted to be. I find that strength lay in vulnerability, in taking responsibility for yourself and others and owning up to the mistakes you have made and moving on. Being a man is not about whether you can throw a football or if you like basketball. It's not about asserting your authority over the submissive wife.
It's about striving to be better, caring for those around you, in daring to be who you are without compromise, respecting the women in your life, enough to hear them, enough to recognize their humanity and not reduce them to sexual objects, to be comfortable in them walking in their power.
I learned all of that without my father. It was his absence that made me better and I only realized that after seeing him and thinking what kind of man I might have been if he had been in my life. Strange how that works.
Some of my friends tell me I'll make a great father, that I'll strive to not make the same mistakes my father did, that I'll be there for my kids.
One of my favorite episodes of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air is when Will meets his father, played by Ben Vereen.  By the end of the episode, Will's father is gone, again, and Will wonders out loud why his father doesn't want him. And he tells Uncle Phil how he's going to have a bunch of children and take care of them and love them. It's a touching scene, heartbreaking in exposing a young man's simple desire for the love of his father.
But the truth is, I don't see myself having children. I don't know if that will change but that's how I feel right now, at this instant. And it's pretty definitive. I don't feel the need to have children and prove to myself that I can be the great father that my father wasn't to me.
I just want to be the best man I can be. I'm still learning what that means. Help me keep learning.

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.