America Won’t Let Me

It’s just Thursday and in two days America has yet again dragged my sorry behind back to their sad painful reality. See, on Sunday, I was enjoying conversations and realizing I was on the precipice of having my first real crush, as a sensible adult.

Monday met me all in my feelings, I didn’t mind the feelings I was suddenly wrapped in. Heck, I was gushing to my friends about how I now had a type; smart, intellectual, and has a sense of humor. At 23, I finally had some sense of who my type was. Tuesday still found me reveling in this gooey feelings. I was even having conversations about my feelings with God. My day was good.

Wednesday the cloud started to get darker. I tried to hold tight to the tiny rays of sunshine I could still find. No way on this earth would this darkness find me and keep me, hostage, again.

I had one resolve in mind. Detach! Detach! Detach! This was too heavy, too real, too painful, too close to home. For the second time in a month despite the agonizing throes of my menstrual cramps, I was happy I was a woman. I was less threatening, less scary, less manly, less black. I wasn’t a black man in white America.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still black, but per dictations of patterns and statistics, I was less likely to intimidate a police officer with access to lethal weapons and specialized training. I wasn’t as rabid a dog as a black man. I was less likely to have a painful death at the hand of a white supremacist. My blackness wasn’t that much of a weapon.

Wednesday evening met me functioning in denial. I changed the subject when my friends brought it up. I didn’t have any social media pages at my disposal to remind me. I shut down my cousin when she tried to analyze George Floyd’s death with me. She got my usual reply “I would not raise my black son in America. This is the most hateful country. I would rather go back home and deal with stupid police officers”

It is one thing in my opinion to kill because of stupidity and recklessness than to kill from a place of hate. Stupidity and recklessness can be corrected, strict punishment can be meted out. Education could fix this. But how can you change generational hatred? Institutionalized hatred in a country with an equally hate-mongering leader?

Thursday morning met me with an urge to pray for my friends, my family, myself, black people, and white America.

Isn’t this insanity? the same cycle is repeated over and over again! My mechanism to detach, be emotionally unavailable to this sort of injustice no longer does its job. I can’t. It’s too close to home for me. This cannot be my reality. The reality for my black children or husband. I don’t even have any of these right now but I am so livid, disgusted, and afraid. Police brutality, white injustice could become my reality in some alternate universe.

My resolve to leave this country waxes stronger. How do people who can’t leave deal with this? This is the heaviness that they have to carry until they breathe their last?

America once again won’t let me be, won’t let me revel in my crush, won’t let me live, won’t let me breathe

I can’t breathe

• Freddie Gray (2015)

I can’t breathe

• George Floyd (2020)

New decade, same problems.