Late 2021, I thought I had enough art and poems to put together a collection. As I compiled all the relevant pieces and posts into a spreadsheet, organizing themes and scrolling through a crop of columns from with to craft a manuscript, I realized I had enough for more than the little volume I had imagined. I thought I would have something ready to print within a year’s time, given that most of the work was already done. Of course, discovering Tom kind of sidetracked all of that.
I am coming up on 18-months post-surgery, and part of me still struggles with the fact that I can’t sit down and type up the words I wrote and revised years ago. It feels like it should be easy—just a matter of keystrokes and formatting, right? I’m tempted to try working on it this summer, because there is too much in the pit of my stomach to keep down. I don’t want to think about publishing, but I have to do something about the viciousness devouring me from the inside out.
Anger is too soft a word and rage is too strong. I haven’t cried in a while, despite desperately wanting to. I have my playlists instead, full of Sleep Token and Emeli Sande. My gravely throat and scarred tongue are my only trophies from swallowing down my words and biting back fear and fury. That’s what all the poems from Late in the Midnight Hour were supposed to be about: restless and relentless nights from which there is no sunrise, only another day of the world on fire.
I used to feel so guilty for all the things I didn’t know and for all the ways I felt like I wasn’t doing enough. For a while, I got caught up in trying to earn some kind of belonging with Black folks. If I learned enough, if I knew all the right things, maybe my voice would matter to them. I have no evidence that it does, or ever has, or if it will. Meanwhile, white people expected me to know every activist, be involved with every protest and platform. When they’d interrogate me on my perspective, I challenged them on their own assumptions of what it meant to be navigating elections and riots as a Black person.
I didn’t take a lot of time to untangle the decades of disaster I came from and lived in and had to look forward to. How could I? You can’t process the shifts in gravity when your world stays nine different kinds of upside down. You just nimbly roll with the punches and find new ways to stand and hide away the most precious parts of yourself. At least, that’s what I did. It’s what I’m still doing. Most people think I’m doing okay, patiently taking things day by day. I get told I’m doing such a great job, that I’m handling everything so well, and that it’s a testament of my character and God’s goodness.
Sure. Whatever.
You don’t want to know where I see God in all this. You don’t want to hear how my faith has completely crumbled. You don’t have the patience for the despair shredding through my intestines, the messy stitches I’ve resewn time and time again with shaking hands, the infectious dream of dying only to find out I have been damned from the beginning. No one wants to sit through that. No one has words to say or gifts to give to help me get well soon.
I meet the world with a listening ear and a thoughtful heart and from a homemade operating room soaked with my own blood and people praise me for it. Maybe my writing is a way to throw it back in their faces, but I don’t think I care about that part. I’ve learned that there will always be something wrenching my spirit and crushing my hope. It will always take everything in me to carry on. And no matter how far I journey, I’ll still die one day.
Again and for the first and final time—but until then?
V. H. King's Ink 