A Peculiar Pain

Yesterday, my best friend would have turned 26. Yesterday, he didn’t. Today, I did. And as has been tradition for the last two years, I spent time reflecting on the cycle of life and death, and how black folks in inner cities are constantly met with a peculiar pain: the pain of being erased.

The erasure of our voices. Our images. Our bodies.

Black girls either learn to silence themselves early on or bear the burden of angry, loud for a lifetime. I chose the former, and in making my existence digestible, became unrecognizable to myself. Instead of facing the enormity of my emotions, I dreamed of alternate universes or visited the worlds of my favorite authors. So many moments of the first 20 or so years of my life are massive dark spots, but I can recall my favorite poems or scriptures with ease. These were my only reality.

Presently, in just three months, I have spent about $1,633 in an attempt to fill in the gaps. Between therapy, an astrologer, and a quantum healing hypnosis, I am beginning to put together the puzzle of Monique. Self-awareness is a luxury. Self-actualization, a privilege.

On May 28th 2018, I couldn’t walk. After a little deep-breathing and a lot of crying, I was able to pry myself from the floor. Two years after my best friend’s death, I finally decided it was time to return to therapy. The earliest available appointment? June 3rd- the 21st anniversary of my mother’s death (because the universe is funny like that.)

And so I went. And I talked. And I cried. And I remembered things that had long been buried. And I cried some more. For 50 minutes each Sunday, I am afforded the opportunity to just be. Sad. Angry. Happy. Excited. Monique.

And this is a privilege not everyone has. There’s a Jay-z lyric that’s been stuck in my mind for months. “I remember summer nights in the projects/bullet rounds interrupting my qi.” Qi, or chi, is Life Force energy. When a person is constantly met with the singing of bullets, the howling of sirens, a chorus of helicopters, their Life Force energy is prohibited from flowing. The constant shock to the nervous system renders them traumatized. This is PTSD inherited from living in the hood.

Most times, we don’t even know we need help. We grow used to the chorus until it fades into a subtle silence. The background noise is erased, along with our voices that learned to stop asking for help. No one would hear us.

On May 28th 2016, I couldn’t silence the noise. News headlines everywhere reminded us that Bryce was no longer. They had erased his body. Another black boy, gone. And I wanted to disappear with him. Silently, and slowly, I did. I stopped eating. And then a year later, news headlines reminded us that about 75,000 black women were missing. So who was I to make myself disappear?

So many things have disappeared. My memories, my best friend, my mother. The week Bryce passed, my phone stopped working. All of our conversations, erased. My laptop with photos and videos, erased. I was forced to let go. But this time, I wouldn't forget.

In all of the stories I read as a little girl, very rarely were any of them about people who looked like me. Where had all the images of us gone? Another lyric that’s been stuck in my head for months is Beyonce’s “I will never let you shoot the nose off my pharaoh.” When Europeans traveled to Africa, they’d shoot the large noses off of statues of pharaohs. The evidence of their blackness, erased.

History is told by the ones with the most weapons. But times are changing. Black artists are reclaiming our images and birthing new ones. We are refusing to be erased. My retrieval of stories from the holes in my memory are paralleled to our retrieval of ancestral stories. Ancestral images. Blackness is not synonymous with trauma. Blackness is synonymous with Love, Divinity, Creation. And I will continue to use my privilege to remind every Black Child that a corrupt government also attempted to erase Jesus. And you, too, are God’s Sun.

Rise.