I thought I missed you today. I looked for you absentmindedly like when the ghost of my eyeglasses slides down the bridge of my nose and muscle memory eases them back into place only to remember I am wearing contact lenses. I was worried as I felt you turning away from me. Will you leave me lonely? Will life be easier without you?
I was impressionable when I met you, ice cream dissolving its form, taking shape in the palm of your hand. Safety was your intention but it never quite built a shelter from anguish. My eyes captured images transcribed by my brain that always seemed to contradict the the oral stories of others. I learned to rationalize a square peg into a round hole. I learned from you the art of story telling.
Elders reasoned to protect me by insisting “don’t wear your heart on your sleeve.”
Runaway loves rationalized their own self preservation in conflict by concluding “you’re just too much.”
Educators puzzled at my semblance of intellect, offered their surprise, “see, I didn’t know you knew that word.”
Acute lords of office politics organized a culture of double speak corporate jargon and willed staff into theater arts rather than autonomous productivity. I wasn’t a good performer and you told me I was lazy and uncaring, that I wasn’t ambitious enough.
You analogized that I should trust my own understanding as I trust the Sun newspaper to favorably report on black Baltimore and trust the understanding of others as I trust every other rotation of my tires to collide with an asphalt crater in the city. Relinquish your power in the face of dominance was your message. You taught me I am not a reliable narrator of my own story. I should not trust myself.
You colored in as many lines as I needed you to in order to make sense of this disorienting practice. I chanted the self imposed mantra “I must’ve misunderstood…maybe if I change, the outcome will be different..you just have to learn to articulate yourself more succinctly, be more clear.” Fawn and defer. I didn’t always listen and was reminded when branches of good graces snapped like potato chips when I asked cyclone lovers to be mindful of their winds. They couldn’t be lulled to a breeze and nurtured the rooted belief that I needed to evolve to withstand their climate change.
Mayonnaise mayors of metrics spread through the offices of every job description I was tasked with executing. A standard corporate condiment muting the flavors of creativity, entrapping spice in monotony, yet you taught me not excelling within this Hellman’s jar was a personal failure. So, I believed you. I intellectually understood the problematic practices of wage labor yet still leaned into your understanding, that I was just an unmotivated sloth of an employee.
Promises to keep me safe, to protect me began to feel fleeting and unstable as the eleven times I transitioned between homes before graduating high school. You were supposed to bring security and stability. I was at least supposed to be able to trust — you.
Searching for space, seeking solace from this chronic inadequacy, this pervasive acquiescence, this eternal distance from belonging led me sheltering under pierced umbrellas in rainfall and toward ambivalent hugs that I reimagined as deep pressure embraces of well worn kinship. My knowing remained tucked, patient and persistent but lingering in the attic of home, packed away in childhood. I had been away from there a long time when I finally looked you in the eye and asked you why are we always running? Where are we running to? What are we running from? You didn’t feel so protective anymore. Curious inquiry leveled your massive scaffolding to its foundation. Distrusting myself paced my sprints from harm only to disorient me, displacing external pain with internal loss. Where life felt like a room with no door, your lessons erased the floor. At the mercy of gravitational time dilation, difficulty ambled leisurely as I perpetually sunk deeper into the room without a landing.
Layers of paint were stripped from the walls of my understanding when I encountered the undressing words of Audre Lorde asserting “If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.” I felt folded and pressed and folded and pressed into obscurity partially by your own hand. For how could I get hurt if I didn’t exist was your rationale. But as Baltimore’s summer humidity wrinkled what was neatly pressed and folded self beliefs, I lost you. I’d wanted to lose you but still grieved your absence. How could I ever forget about you?
I am engaged to a new beginning now, they are steady like you, well intentioned too. They offer grace when I fall back on your old teachings and help me imagine and construct a new praxis that entrusts me to myself. You taught me to have infinite grace, empathy, and understanding for others. I developed an appreciation for sonder with you but not the discernment to define the boundaries of others emotional floor from their ceiling for you trained me in space without either. The dilation of time expanded my epochs of contemplation so I knew in time our roads would diverge though how and when remained unclear. Our dovetailed needs developed delicately and neatly like a Mozart harp concerto and cleaved as I began to defy the boundaries of the margins like genre bending Fela Kuti.
You are a meaningful loss. Gratitude and grief rests in your stead. Insightful observations, measured responses, and carrying the truth of our own contradictions and multiplicities were unexpectedly cultivated from knowing you. The fool’s errand of regret charges my grief for what could’ve been had I never met you. The sage of reflection reframes regret and widens its aperture to center my own evolution as the central imprint. I am grateful to have evolved past your utility, I am grateful to rely on my own lens now.
cover image: micro-fiction story poster - arrival (2024) ronald jackson