002. on pictures I didn't take

I’ve been listening to this Orion Sun song for at least a week. I can’t remember where I heard it. It’s not really a song. “Mango (Freestyle/Process)”, it’s called. On repeat, it’s an incantation, a meditation, a spell. I can’t always write to music. I can write to this.

I’ve been thinking a lot about something Maya Angelou said. How she carried the kindness of all the people she encountered with her onto the stage. 

“Come with me,” she’d say, summoning them before each reading. “I need you now.”

I’ve built a life on the kindness of the people I’ve met along the way. Slipped them into those idiosyncrasies people tend to take for granted: putting cinnamon in coffee grounds every morning, drinking from the mug covered with remnants of Paris from someone you will always love though you don’t speak anymore, slathering on whipped shea butter religiously after a hot shower, but without the tea tree oil. You remember the only night you ever spent in Staten Island. The ferry ride there. Your first time. Moments without photographic evidence, embedded in habit and memory. You, me, you understand.

I still drink Twinning’s English Breakfast Tea because an old friend from England said it was the best before she asked me how I took my tea and fixed it for me. We’d spend hours in New Rochelle watching British sitcoms, driving around, meeting other friends, laughing our proverbial asses off between her reenacting Catherine Tate sketches or perfecting her American accent that was, actually, pretty damn good.

These days I’m giddy, calling someone because I don’t want to sleep without hearing their voice. I’m, maybe, reading Baldwin with someone else. Saving up pieces of my week to share them with one of very few people who can see me. Standing beneath bridges holding hands and sometimes bodies in the autumn cold because we both know winter is coming.

How do you live in the in-between-ness of liminal spaces? When you’re waiting for the fruit of your labor to ripen?

Someone told me recently, as we stood on a different bridge over a highway, that you’re more likely to forget something if you take a picture of it. It felt dangerous and beautiful, standing there, staring into traffic. Like it could be the place to go to for that loud city quiet if I ever needed it.

Really you forget because pictures are mostly filed away. Taken, and left behind. Never to be seen again.

What belongs to me anymore?

Back in my day, when I bought something it was mine. No recurring, anything. It was mine, outright. It belonged to me.

Now, I wonder if I dreamed it. I think I did, we do, in a way.

There was my old boss, whistling as he sang, “Mawwnin,” a stretched out beautiful greeting song I will never hear with that frequency again. And before that, sitting in the childhood room I shared with my sister in our old house on Haabets Gade. (In Danish, that translates to ‘the hope riddle’, but really ‘hope street’. I find both iterations interesting.)

Using dial-up. Typing in AOL codes and entering chat rooms, always asking, “a/s/l?” Floppy disks, remember those? Computer programs prompted with CD’s. I loved racing cars but, sooner or later, I always ended up going the wrong way. Don’t ask me how. It was rare to speak to someone who had heard of where I was from. It’s sometimes still the case. A 15-minute flight from Puerto Rico I say usually. A place they’ve heard of.

And before that, Addie Ottley on the radio, fielding birthday greetings from callers with authority in their throats, wishing loved ones happy birthdays and well wishes, hoping to win the cake from Frank’s Bakery that day.

Walking to the store after school with money my grandfather gave me some morning, a few seconds after he told me he didn’t have any change, only to call me back - doling out a dollar for each of us, my cousin, my sister and I.

Do you still play games on your phone? What are you reading? How much?  More? Less?

And then there are people, too.  But that was, is a kind of deception. They never belong to you. 

An aside: I’m still thinking about bell hooks’ definition of love being “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

Pictures I did not take:

• Standing on the corner outside of the Strand, watching the sunset, a sliver of sky between buildings, with the first person that ever made me feel tall. She is sweet and cute and direct and hilarious without trying to be.

• Playing fetch and tug of war on Riis Beach with a poodle who is equally as gentle and loving as his beautiful human who watched as we played in the middle of a workday in November, moments before getting in the water. Sitting on the shore, freezing in that yellow hoodie (from the OG Verzuz with Jill Scott and Erykah Badu), under a blanket, being present, being held.

• Crying in bed one morning.

• Dancing in the kitchen a few minutes later.

• Saturday night.

• Sunday morning.

• Laughing with a Black man at Ikea who had jokes in the self-checkout line.

• Burning braided sweetgrass in remembrance, in homage, this morning.

Remembering that this society does not care that I’m alive. I am thinking about justice being a world where Ahmaud Arbery turned 26. Where Malikah Shabazz was cared for by both parents who lived long lives. Where defending Black people didn’t get you murdered, and your murderer exonerated. Where Denise Williams and countless others are still here. Where everything is not a fight.

I must care for myself, the only thing that belongs to me because, as Audre Lorde said, being here in this way is an act of political warfare. And even that is temporary.

You still haven’t told me, by the way. What it mean to be free?