I hope you make it home. I hope you make it to where you are destined to go. I hope you never give up the fight for the world in which we live to be better.
As bleak as things can be, I believe in the unexpected joys you can't see right now because the present is the present and the future is still unwritten.
Make it home. Make home wondrous and beautiful and magnificent. Make home a blessing and not a curse. Make home refuge from the storm.
Make home you. Make home the you that you always wished you could be. Make home the you that you want to be, the you that you imagine is in the mirror staring back at you. Make that your home.
Comfy. Warm. Filled with all the things that make home a home and not simply a house.
Make home love. So that when you walk in, hate stays out. That when hate comes in, home is to hate like garlic is to vampires.
I hope you make it home. I hope all of us make it home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
