"When they ask why we stayed together for so long I say I don’t know."

Prism

My friend Derrick says love is the only war worth dying for. 

But every time I say, “please come back”, 

I feel like I”m trying to find a dirty needle in a haystack, 

and God knows I can’t go out like that.

I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity

Our lovers’ necks are so soft. 

I lost my head so many times

I got sober just hoping my eyes would dry

Still, I drink so much in my sleep, I can’t sleepwalk a straight line to the guest room or collapse, hang so heavy inside her lungs

She speaks and her voice trips across her heartbeat, 

each word limps into the air

We are gone, she says.

And I am no mortician; I have no idea how to put make-up on the dead. 

I have no idea how to unerase, 

so I just puddle at the door, 

my face looking like a deck of falling cards, 

like everything’s been playing me.

We tried so hard

But when I said “give me a ring”, 

she thought I meant a call 

Now I haven’t had her number for three years 

We’ve been saying how many times are we going to keep cutting these red flags into valentines. 

You know, all those wars we fought have turned our shine into rust, 

we can’t even touch each other’s hearts without a tetanus shot.

We can’t begin to remember how we forgot

there is no shelter in the womb 

The heart forms long before the ribcage 

My mother swore she could feel me kicking weeks before my feet formed

That’s how hard my heart beat — 

and it still does.

They say the womb is where we learn love 

is knowing the cord that feeds you could at any moment wrap around your neck 

I hold my breath for the entire 56 seconds it takes her to walk to the window 

to stare at the road to tell me

she has nothing left to tell me, 

we are done

carrying our level heads in our tornado chests

For the first time, I know she is right

As the dawn, after our first date, we were so young, 

I hadn’t even written honest love poem yet 

I hadn’t met anyone I could fall so hard for

‘til the night we kissed on our skateboards, 

she teased me for going so slow. 

I said I never want to catch up to the letting go.

I want the plead in my throat to forever anchor my spine to the seams of your worn slippers, 

love, even when the dove crashed into the window, 

even when our friends said, you can call it love, 

but you know Einstein called himself a pacifist when he built the bomb.

When they ask why we stayed together for so long I say

I don’t know.

I just know that we cried at the exact same time in every movie. 

I know we blushed everyday for the first two years. 

I know I always stole the covers and she never woke me up.

I know the exact look on her face,

the first night she used my toothbrush. 

The next day, I brushed my teeth like thirty-some times, 

‘cause I didn’t want to let her go. 

You have to understand when it hurt to love her, 

it hurt the way the light hurts your eyes in the middle of the night, 

but I had to see,

Even through the ruin, if what we were burying were seeds 

There were so many plants in our house, you could rake the leaves

Even through that winter 

when I was trying to make angels in the snow of her cold shoulder. 

She was still leaving love notes in my suitcase; I’d always find them

The day before I left.

I remembered a story her mother told me. 

She said, Andrea, when Heather was a little girl, 

she couldn’t fall asleep without tying a string around her finger that stretched to mine in the other room. 

All night long,she’d give that string the tiniest tug to make sure I was still there 

And when I’d tug back that was love

That was love

As easy as that

Sometimes. 

Sometimes.

agony.

This is undoing years of hard work in a single night.

Tell me how to make peace with this.

Well I tried to control it, and cover it up.

So I tried to forget it
That was all part of the show
Told myself I'd regret it
But what do I know?

   In a previous episode of the Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed Ava DuVernay, the film director of Selma while exploring the idea that America is a post-racial society. This March marked the 49^th anniversary of the Selma campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, in which thousands of nonviolent demonstrators marched from Selma to Montgomery in campaign for voting rights and in response to the deaths of Reverend James Reeb and Jimmie Lee Jackson. When the activists refused to disband even when threatened with violence, they were beaten and tear gassed. Waiting officers chased those who managed to escape the crowd and continued the beating. Peaceful protestors were assaulted for daring to stand up for freedoms they deserved and speaking out against the murder of innocent men.  After the movement, which emerged from racial violence and disproportionate police brutality, Black communities celebrated and believed they had accomplished another step towards equality. However, 50 years later, the cases of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and numerous others tell the world otherwise.

            Due to the specific cases that drew attention to the perceptions of race, the popular hashtag #AllLivesMatter, has consumed social media. This particular hashtag has become a major theme discussed among all mass media, implying that the more progressive idea is to be colorblind to race. This is a problem because, although it appears to be a great concept, in reality it is masqueraded ignorance. To disregard race and its influence is to invalidate the cultural heritage and challenges people of color experience. Ideas cannot be understood unless it is examined thoroughly, thus dismissing race as an element of personal identity allows racism to thrive.

            There is nothing wrong with the affirmation that all lives matter, because all human beings inalienably and inherently encompass worth. Nevertheless, there is an insidious message beneath the proclamation: it assumes that all people in this country have been and are treated equally. Therein lies the misconception of this trend; historically, that has not been true. As a result of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism, people of color have been left marginalized and with disadvantaged access to equal opportunity. It is not enough to declare #AllLivesMatter when this country was discovered on the ideology that all lives never matter as much as White European lives did. #BlackLivesMatter does not mean to prioritize a certain minority community over another, but to serve as a reminder that there are people in today's world that do not believe the statement. 

             It is not appropriate to post hashtags and avoid uncomfortable conversations about race and privilege. The problem of racial conflicts cannot be solved without proactive and honest dialogues about race. We must acknowledge America’s ugly history that still precipitates startling ramifications for people of color today and embrace multiculturalism. Multiculturalism recognizes and respects the differences we have. We must use our voice to speak up, but not speak over marginalized groups. Although I tend to have a more introverted personality, I want to start being more intentional with speaking up about any oppression that is witnessed and to encourage society to apologize for oppressive or offensive behaviors when they are being pointed out. Simultaneously, we must hold in tension the ways each of us has privileges that perpetuate patterns of oppression in other human beings. Through mutual accountability and education, we must strive towards intersectionality. Let's subvert the misguided assumption that race does not affect human experiences; it is the intersections and differences that make us who we are. 

When it happens, you do not exist to him. You are not a person.

You are a flimsy, anthropomorphic rag doll that he throws around. He will pull apart, he will position, and drag you by your wrists. He will ignore you as if he is alone in that room with the volume of his thoughts turned on too loud. He'll break. He'll throw your body against the walls. He'll scar and suffocate. When you protest, he'll go harder. He'll shove you into blanks. He'll destroy you internally and externally. He'll finish, then hold you and cradle you with coldness like he cares.

When it happens, you do not exist to yourself.

You'll dissociate. You'll hover above your body and watch the macabre scene unfold. You'll stare blindly at a spot on the ceiling until it's over. You'll fade into oblivion. Into tranquility. You think a thousand things at once. About how it feels to die. If there will be a tomorrow. When he does not kill you, you'll wonder why. You'll crave it. You will shower in burning hot water for months, but still feel where he touched you. 

You will shiver in the summer.