More Than Sunday Mornings

My mom always taught me, to be thankful for what I already have. So from a young age, only having more Melanin than the ‘white kids’ was enough for me. But after countless winters, when the sun stopped loving my skin, and left it’s loyalty with my classmates after Christmas Break in the Bahamas. I wondered if there was anything that money couldn’t buy. There aren’t many girls around here that have a different backstory than the majority. And mixing the blood of an African and an Indian doesn’t give you blonde hair and blue eyes, it gives you rough skin passed down from your mother who fled Uganda during the times of Idi Amin. It gives you strong tear ducts from your dad who left his family in India at 18 to come to the US. It gives you faith in Allah, or God, or whatever you want to call the good man upstairs. It gives you the color of the men that sent those beautiful towers full of beautiful people to the heavens far beneath New York City. And little kids don’t know much better than the things they overhear while they’re half asleep half awake on the couch at night. But my soul was my virginity and racism always hurts worse when it’s the first time. I came to understand later, that on that day, there were words written on my skin that weren’t my own. Tattooed on by people who were using ignorance as their anesthesia. And that anyone who thought they were writing their own story is sadly mistaken, because others are always holding their pens against our vulnerable spirits. 
 And even though people sometimes write bad things, those are the ones that eventually get erased. It’s the beautiful ones, the ones that release endorphins, and feels like a night in Paris, and flows and rhymes, so you sing along. One day you’ll end up wearing a black dress that you paid too much for. And people will tell you to pull up your slipping jeweled straps and that the neckline shows too much cleavage for you to be anything more than indecent. They’ll find your character sewn within the threads of the gown, And you’ll finally realize that disposable income doesn’t bring happiness. And you come to learn that even your old sweaters, woven with soft fabric and joy, cannot protect your innocence forever. And that people who smoke cigarettes are not bad, because some people breathe violence and hatred as their carcinogens and it’s harder to recover from that. And sometimes, you meet people who blossom roses and tulips, and you feel flowers in your lungs. And you come to realize that the world is more than just waiting for Sunday mornings. It’s walking into the storm right after you took the tags off your clothes. Not apologizing that you’re using your skin to get what other people had to use their money for. And when they say that you don’t deserve it, being smart enough to know that strength does not know the value of paper. Because what they don’t understand is that their grandmother has a graduate degree and mine didn’t make it a month in Missouri, because when someone has cancer, kicking them out of their country is not the same kind of pain as chemotherapy. And even when somebody is exiled, they’re still considered an immigrant, and we all know that the only people who deserve healthcare are the ones that can afford it. So if someone sees my pigment as paper, I’m not gonna tell them they’re wrong. It’s knowing that color is a fine line between right and wrong, and at some point you’re going to be sitting in a boat deciding which way to go. When the devils and the angels are heavier than the weight on your shoulders, and everyone is watching you, urging you toward one shore or the other, a blind poet scribbling notes and LBJ and Huck Finn and Abbie Hoffman, and all the dead soldiers back from the grave, it’s being able to decide whether what you have is a curse or a blessing. And you realize that you’re way too young to have to make this decision, but the only thing that little kids in morgues are still able to tell you, is that this world is blind to age. And I’ve been at the bow and looked up at what seemed like a Godless sky and questioned my faith. And I’ve looked for temples and hoped that they were there, and wanted to throw bricks at whatever God there may be and ask why bad things happen to good people. And I used to think that crying in the rain was a little easier, because only the clouds could tell the difference between tears and raindrops. But when you can’t breathe and can’t think straight, and even through the tears the end of the river is clearer than your mind, it doesn’t matter anymore because no one knows what you’re feeling. And in the end, it’s not about right or wrong. It’s whether you have enough courage to do what you want with your life or giving in to what other people think is the right thing to do. And when you’re sixteen and you’ve spent your whole life writing in journals and making poetry that puts flowers on bad things and loving words because they don’t make your voice tremble, you’re gonna listen to your family and your teachers and you’re gonna think about your future and you’re gonna remember when you were little and all you wore were eight dollar jogging suits from Target, and you’re gonna dream about New York and you’re gonna go home. You’re not gonna take the risk because you think you’re too young for it to be worth it. And you’re gonna wonder if you made the right decision, but you’ll just keep laying flowers on the damn thing because people are proud of you. And there’s nothing left to do but look up at the stars and hope that this was their plan for you. I have come to appreciate the winter, because youth is one long internal struggle and you can always find peace with yourself in a bathtub full of hot water and bubbles. And if that doesn’t solve your problems, at least you know the days are little bit shorter, and the stars above will always keep shining for you.