Let Me Impose a Few Things, and Then Some, but, Ultimately, Try to Confront Something Greater That Remarks Us as People but also as Individuals

There was a plan in my head on what to write for my last blog entry: the juxtaposition of who I am now versus the first time I went on this trip. An intricate array of hallways was shifting in my head, I walked down them with steady feet. I watched the walls shift and turn, the floor changing textures: carpet, tile, hardwood. It all seemed dreamlike, nearly impossible that these fantastical things were happening to me. At some point, I assumed I was daydreaming at the time. Completely and utterly lost in my own world, in my head at the possibility that I was going mad because it was so real. It all felt maladaptive, to say the least. I walked for so long in my own head that my feet hurt, my dream feet.

Yet as I walked, I relived memories through stained glass panes. Vibrant hues of blue and yellow, green and gold, turbulent oranges and reds, audacious yellows and pinks. Through one, I saw myself, small and young, with a smile on my face and the reality that I wanted to step into my Mother’s high heels. I did. I drifted into her closet and slipped my tiny little foot into her shoes and pranced around, knowing so very well that what I was doing was wrong, but feeling so very happy with myself and my tiny little mischief. I walked and walked until my ankles burned, until footsteps creaked around the corner and my mother slipped into view and stared at me. I didn’t move. I didn’t even stop smiling. She smiled at me. She saw me. She knew and she said not a word, only slinked around me, fiddled with things and I kept on my prancing. More footsteps. A warning and then I was out of the shoes. Out of the closet, out of the memory. But out of this moment, I stepped into a new one.

I walked alongside this boy. The first boy I loved. He was taller than me, a year older than me—he was in fifth grade, I was in fourth grade and he smiled at me so often I felt seen, I felt heard, I felt like I had a friend, and then some. Then I retaliated. Against my own desires and needs as a child, I turned from the scared little boy in fourth grade whose only friend was Mrs. Martin who saw me entirely. I told her about Jason and she smiled. She asked if I liked him and I told her I wanted to be his friend. She smiled more and took my hand. I knew she knew more than I wanted her to, but she was warm, she was bright, and she was safe. Then I became a bully. I became mean and bitter because it was all I knew to be. I knew to be mean because the world was cruel and if I was not cruel like it was, I would be buried, put under, grown over like an empty, dying patch of dirt in a garden full of dead flowers and sprouting, reaching weeds. And those weeds would grow over me, and they would grow until I choked on their roots, until I felt the air slip from my lungs and I died on the earth. Until a hand pulled me back up.

A hand I wish I knew better. This wasn’t a memory but a dream, a hope that my grandmother would see me now and see me entirely. Her hands were soft and warm and I was cold and stiff, like stone. And yet, she shaped me. The brush of her disembodied hand would chisel at me until I realized so much and she would remove the dust and marble from my eyes and I would see colors like I had never seen. The panes of glass were so brilliant and so bright, it blinded me but I never looked away. I watched as my footsteps hit concrete and I rose from the underground. Out of my body, displaced in a city I would remember for days, months, years. An eternity may go by and still, I would remember the fervor of being in San Francisco with all its color and all its energy and all its sun.

But an eternity will go by and I will feel hollow. A gaping hole of the missing pieces of myself as a Brown person lacking the intersections of my life. There are pockets of myself that I want to share but cannot because most people will not understand or be able to see beyond the haze of the stained glass portraiture. There are also pockets that I cannot share.

There’s this displacement of my Blackness and my Queerness that I will never be able to share with most people. It’s hard to put into words, let alone to speak aloud, that being a Black person, being a Black, Queer Immigrant is I will not find a comfort in the three anytime soon or maybe at all. The aspects of my cultural identity are broken into shards, picked and painted, and placed into wireframes. Stained glass windows of a church, of a bay window.

I sink into this place of never fitting in and never being able to fit in because of who I am—neither a bad thing nor a good thing. An impossible thing to say the least. I will always situate myself between Blackness, Queerness, and Immigrant-hood when appropriate, when convenient, when necessary, when I want. I have no grasp of the ideals of Blackness the same way that my Black friends do. I have no reach for Queerness the same way my Queer friends do. I have no reach for Immigranthood the same way my Immigrant friends do. In the words of my Mum: I have two long hands and never stay still.

Each day I sit and reflect on what we use to bring together the parts of ourselves that we are unable to fully conceptualize. How we fashion our identities to anchors that bring us some semblance of fulfillment. And, of course, to each their own, that uniqueness, that changing idealization is riveting and vibrant and diverse, but what do we reach for with it? How do we investigate and translate the needs of our persons to fit an image we have created out of abstract ideas, personal anecdotes, and irreverent needs to satisfy the qualms of our wandering dispositions?

To answer that question—something I’ve asked myself for so long—I think about love. I think about it often. Who I love and the criteria I imposed on myself to satisfy the urge to cover every base of who I am and then some. So I ask questions about my expectations for this person and hope I see the answer: Will you understand my Queerness for all it is? The world is vibrant but it is also dark and imperfect for us. I will love you wholeheartedly and unabashedly but will never feel safe knowing that loving you out loud in the daylight is a danger. I am willing to risk my safety for you. I am willing to know that love is a fickle thing with gentle wings and lives purely on hope. Hope for us. Hope for tomorrow. Hope. Then, I ask—will you see me in all my color, for my Blackness as obscure as it is, but also for where I am from? This is the thinly veiled concern I carry everywhere. I am Black, yes, light-skinned as I may be, I know this and I want to cherish it for all it is. I see my family and wonder will feel comfortable and worry if will they feel comfortable. I see the small jokes, the laughter, the teasing because that is what we do. Playful and harmless. But I also see that you impose a burden. A burden of lessons and a burden of knowing you entirely. The imposition that your presence invokes is fickle, sure, but it is also curious and weary. As I said, what abstractions of yourself and your connections to your identity history and ancestry have you imposed onto yourself that you hold to the light?

So many questions. Perhaps some of them are wrong, and perhaps some of them are too honest. But I ask them to myself, hoping to see an answer.

There are so many shapes and colors in the glass. There are so many portraits and memories in the window. There are lost boys on islands and lost souls in the cold. Let me impose—the only person that will love you, all of you—all of you—is you.

There’s this lack of connection, for me at least, between myself, as though my limbs are held together by the threads of spiderwebs, tugged and pulled by the winds of a treacherous storm. In one moment, my arms were pulled from me, never off, but away from the sockets of my shoulders where they were safe. Now, they fling and fly in a rabid fury. The next moment, my legs detach themselves from the secureness of their ball and hinge. Also rabid and flinging and flying. Then there goes my head. Like a balloon it boughs and waves.

A dreadfulness often overcomes me when I am silent when I am still. I am forced to reconcile with the silver-green of myself making its way apart from me. A slinking thing of myself staring at me with those dark eyes filled with questions and fears about the world, about family, the sweatiness that comes with holding hands, the warmth of another leg against mine, the feel of air thicker, fuller, ceaselessly accompanied by a smell.

My throat urges me to speak out these desires and worries, to say something to the part of me that has slipped away. But I am the cold shoulder turned to you. I am the movement of a random thing onto a stack of papers. I am the space between your fingers and the book on a shelf; the hesitation in it. I am the moment that drags on into a headache of decision-making. I am the fear of loving someone entirely because I am not firm in myself. But I am tender.

I never walked in my Mother’s heels. I don’t know why I stopped, or even stopped hiding doing it, especially after being “caught.” But I never forgot the feeling. The way my feet didn’t fit. The way I stumbled over the spaces between tiles. The striking warmth settled low in my stomach. I never did it again. I stopped. I was never told to. I stopped. I stopped because I was more afraid of getting caught than feeling that situational warmth--a warmth that only rose when the moment was right when rooms emptied, when my mind unquieted. When I was alone, I felt a certain amount of joy so irrevocable that I sobbed once. I sobbed when I sat and had nothing else to do but stare and think. I sobbed because I was warm.

I have created this notion in my reality that my personhood requires a specific image, an abstract of an idea to situate myself to the wandering disposition of never fitting in. But why would I fit in? What am I fitting into? What image have I, and we, created for ourselves that is so significant that it throttles our curiosities of freedom, experience, and spirit into the boxes of our own notions of peace and liberation? The daylight is dangerous. The night is furious. The sweat on my palms is not accompanied by anything other than my own qualms with this identity. Why must I fold myself into a geometry that I cannot solve? What pain do we endure when we anchor ourselves to the conceptions of uniqueness, personhood, or connection to the parts of our individual experiences ill-informed?

The truth is identity, personhood, and all things that make each one of us a singularity within a million singularities are the expectations and realizations of life influenced by the causalities of the people we hold dear, send away, and the ones we dream of. The displacement of my Blackness is a consequence of not only myself but also everyone around me. The debilitation of my Queerness is an incompletion of myself and everyone around me. The recklessness of my Immigrant-hood is treachery of myself and everyone. Don’t ask me if I feel pain for these things; I do. I feel immensely for the parts of myself actualized by this trip and the pieces left behind. I want pain. I want love. I want them both for their infinities of yearning for peace. And the moments I am privileged enough to know.

In so many ways, I am eternally grateful for this trip but also then some. There is a body buried in San Francisco made of love and self. There is a body buried in Eau Claire made of love and self. There is a body buried everywhere I have been made of love and self. My imposition is to see myself in all the loose limbs, the pains, the loves, the furious winds, and the madness of dangers that I have yet to see.