V. H. King's Ink

People look back and see an uprising in 2020—swarming into a storm that had been brewing for ages, not since 2016 but since 2014 at least.  There are too many names to list, but the taste of a seething nation cracked open my own lips.  And in the following 18ish months, I thought I could compile something that would match that energy, that fervor, of needed change.

And then it didn’t happen.

When I think of the turning points, of the milestones, of the high points on the timeline, they’re all lows.  Things falling away one by one—my friends, my health, my trust in anything other than the pain I would carry.  Some days, sorrow is the only thing I trust to guide me.  I don’t resent it. I know how to orient myself at rock bottom.  I have bored and blasted through the foundations other people gave to me, and I have found the mineral veins of things I didn’t know how to speak of. 

All that time on someone else’s pedestal—that’s why you have to have perfect posture when you’re Black, lest you topple the bridge.  Everyone says my brother and I were good kids, which is to say we were well-behaved and responsible, which is to say we knew damn well there would be no one to help us figure shit out.  We were expected to know the answers and set an example and be better than whatever it was other kids were doing. 

I grew up hating it—that I couldn’t be a person, that everyone had feelings but was never honest about them, that no one ever admitted that sometimes life just fucking sucks and no amount of prayer or pushing through it would change that. I learned to carve out places in the catacombs of my bones where I could break down the way I wanted, the way I needed. These days I’ve been dusting off the cobwebs down there, reacquainting myself with everything it takes for me to turn away from my favorite dangers.

Lately I find myself laughing at all the ways I was angry before.  As if I’m not angry now, as if there is not some deep river of ire that trickles on the floor of all the tunnels I’ve carved into my skin. I started pouring all the boiling in my blood into meeting others with kindness, because the world is bad enough. I left nothing for myself, because I could do without it. I knew how to survive, starving away my sense of worth and purpose. 

I served myself up on a silver platter for people who still don’t give a shit about who I am and what I love and the things that are important to me. I retreat into places they will never reach; I close myself off because really, what chance do I want to give myself to be trampled by someone else’s chariots of fire?  People ask me why I don’t leave, why I don’t find some way to escape a hellhole where I always regret taking up space and wish to obliterate myself from existence on the daily. They don’t know how I could know myself most truly in opposition to everything I love and hate.

When I first moved back home, I told myself it was like high school all over again.  Same shit, but I had better ways of dealing with it.  I was mostly right but I was misguided too, because I thought there would be a way out of it.  High school had a light at the end of the tunnel and so would this, right?  These days, I’m not so sure.  I have no tangible way out of this: only a veil, a doorway, that no one wants me to pass through. 

This will only end one of two ways, but they’re both the same.  I had a professor who told me something always had to die, in a story.  I’m already a ghost in my own mind, so why not make it a reality?  I think about it more often than sometimes, to borrow a line from Shane Koyczan.  I have very little in the way of keeping me here—and I laugh at myself because I know so many people who would say I have it easy, that there is no room or reason for me to complain. Well, fuck them. 

I don’t want to be here anymore, but I know how to stay.