American Dream

Dear AD,

I've been chasing you since I was a young child old enough to learn your favorite song.

I can remember looking at you with sparkly eyes and a smile as big as the sun. You were my sun, you are what woke me up every morning.

People told me that you were wrong for me, they said your red hands were caused by the bloodshed of my ancestors.

They said your blue body was due to the excruiciating pain from anyone successful that looked like me left on your body.

And your face, oh your pale wretched face that I believed I so deeply loved is due to the shock of knowing that i do not love you anymore. I do not believe in your lies anymore. When you tell me that I matter to you, I know you are just trying to seduce me into giving you my freedom. My livelihood. My sympathy in exchange for your empathy.

What empathy?! You do not know my pain! You don't know what it's like to stay up all night waiting for you to come home to me.

Instead I'm staring at you on the tv screen, cheating on me with some white girl named Irene. Or Sarah. Or Rebecca, sometimes even Tara.

Occasionally an Adam or Brody, you always did tell me you were equal opportunity. But LOOK, another lie you fed me. Y

ou never gave me opportunities, you gave me excuses on why I shouldn't be able to follow you and become apart of you.

I used to think that I was the best part of you, until you showed me why I should part from you. The inner part of me told me that you were a false concept that I conjured up in my head.

It told me that the life I believed we'd build together was all in my head. It made no sense, I never had a sense of how your two cents never mattered.

We were supposed to have the happiness, the wealth, the respect, the good health, and I believed you.

I cut my sleeves in order to bleed green, I worked 3 jobs to make ends meet, still hopeful that you would present me with a better opportunity.

In private, you are like a dream, I fantasize about our life of no worries but in public you brush me off, not even a nod of the chin, I slaved for you all my life, and you claimed George Washington.

But these other people, who don't look like me, "white" by definition have received all of your undivided attention.

And the worst thing about it is that I still have faith that a day will come where we can escape and become one together in a safe place because where I live isn't safe.

I am pinned to walls and cat called, desired by many and wanted by none, I'm on the wrong track of life, yet I still run, toward you with open arms, your charm is what gets me.

You embody everything I thought I wanted to be. I believed you were Harriett, so I followed you to free-Dom, or what I believed was free, damn I'm dumb.

I started listening to other people, my mom included, and she concluded that you were a sour apple, and I convinced her that you'd make sweet juice,

and she told me that sweetness never suit you, but I bought your tie and fixed your collars, and when I called her over she burned all your collars,

I tried to pour water, but it only got hotter. And hotter. And hotter. And I thought, why bother? You were never what you seemed.

Plus you died a long time ago,

R.I.P. the American Dream.