The Pressure to Persist & Mourning

Yellow Brick Road

Apr 23, 2021

This is Yellow Brick Road, an exploration on the guided path. Today is a little somber, a little loose, and a little detached - as I am this week.

We spent last summer marching in the streets, shouting the names of black souls who were taken from this world as though they should’ve never come into a body in the first place. On Tuesday, I waited for a verdict without any guess as to what might happen. History suggested one outcome, evidence suggested the other, and reality suggests neither history nor evidence are reliable sources when both are skewed in favor of your destruction. I was, however, entirely uncertain the outcome mattered. Of course - to his family, loved ones, the folks who would mourn him intimately, it probably does matter. To Breonna Taylor’s family, who have yet to see the same step toward accountability for their sweet girl, it is necessary. And yet, the fact remains that George Floyd’s breath stopped and would never start again, and the system that ripped him from us remains fully intact.

George Floyd in car with black hat and black shirt on next to his daughter Gianna with sunglasses on — George and Gianna Floyd

To not feel the impending doom, I spared myself the suspense and emotional overdrive, and sought a pocket of peace on Tuesday. A long walk to get a new pot and home for my growing plant. I bought a gold, sun pendant with a goofy smile on it, as a reminder that there will soon be days without grief, maybe. Maybe, because I’m not so sure I’ve even felt grief fully, and it doesn’t simply go away, does it? It sinks, and embeds itself in your muscle memory for when you are still enough to grant it rest at your feet. I sipped on an Aperol spritz when the verdict was announced, and felt nothing but despair and prosecco bubbling up through my stomach and lodging itself in my throat. “That man should be alive,” I croaked. There were no other thoughts or words, and we took and Uber to Barclays to return to community. The only thing that makes sense.

I wish I could fashion a world where George Floyd would grow into old age. I wish I could imagine a world where a life of guilt and misery for his murderer would ever be enough. Where carceral justice was worth anything, but a landing place for our rage and sinister obsession with seeing people suffer for their wrongdoings so we may not have to face our own. But his child is without a father. His mother is without a son. His brother is without a brother and basketball buddy. Perhaps the owner of George’s corner store misses his inside jokes. This is how I want to mourn George, because the intrusive thoughts about where we go next as a people to make right on his passing are too much, too demanding, too suggestive that we’ll make it that far. I wonder when we will be able to mourn people like they are people again. Humans with complex experiences and purposes beyond and separate from servitude to projected martyrdom they simply never asked to partake in (fuck you, Nancy Pelosi.)

Now, George exists in iconography and chants at rallies, as though his purpose was our grief, instead of a life full enough to tend to his own, to usher his baby into tending to hers. These humans don’t belong to us. Even if our ownership of them and their stories are tantamount to the lost talisman of our liberation. To honor their selfishness, vulnerability, fear, and disappointment too would be recognition that they were actually here. This is one of the many ways we disrespect life when it ceases to exist. To prove or disprove pristine character. Who among us is of pristine character? More importantly - what conditions exist on this Earth that make operating in good character and survival mutually exclusive experiences? This, too, is consequence of a carceral state - to erase the humanness of a man because it makes us uncomfortable, because it doesn’t fit into our narrative, because it reminds us of our own. Let them be humans with loose ends and final words that we’ll never hear or deserve to know.

Each black person slain by the state brings despair closer to home. When I found out a 16 year old girl was shot to death in Columbus, I imagined who she might have been. When videos from her TikTok surfaced, Ma’Khia blowing kisses and making cheeky pouts at the camera, I knew she was me at 16, just like Breonna was me at 26. They each became etched into my heart forever, a living prayer to destroy everything that threatens mass extinction of Us.

10 seconds. This is all it took for the officer who showed up at Ma’Khia Bryant’s house to decide she must die. In the days following her murder, I have seen this child be referred to as a threat, a dangerous criminal, a maniac, an animal. The list goes on. In interest of my own mental health, I’ve stopped watching executions. I don’t need to see black death to know it could be my fate, but I watched Ma’Khia shift from the terror and instinct of survival in the midst of an attack to lifelessness administered by someone she hoped would protect her. I watched her turn into just a body, and realized this is the only way whiteness sees her anyway. Without a soul. Without a purpose. A detonated bomb to be destroyed before it goes off.

I wish I could imagine a world where Ma’Khia could be a child. Black babies deserve to grow up, but first they deserve a life of fairy tales and imagination to blossom from. While folks do backbends and gymnastics to defend the murder of a child with a knife, I know exactly the conditions that force a fat, black girl into wielding one. I know the same armor required to keep a Ma’Khia Bryant, who was failed so many times before her death, safe from vitriol, violence, and adultification ends up being the smoking gun deeming her an enemy of the state. It’s interesting they see the knife in her hand, while my eyes stayed glue to the rainbow Crocs on her feet, twitching until she was gone.

We wake up each day, read the same horror, use dead people as pawns in political warfare, and let the news cycle drag us into such despondence and apathy that we’re no longer talking about lost lives at all. We attempt to derive a single answer from a stack of systemic issues that have never been solved before us and think 300-something characters will do the trick. I’m tired of being told how to feel about watching executions. I’m tired of being able to count on everyone following the script. Death, design-y infographic, takes about letting ourselves feel, takes demanding our feelings be rendered useless until radical change occurs, takes demanding self-care, takes saying self-care is stupid, complete sensory overwhelm, post TikTok for relief, memory of death gone. I don’t know where we’re expected to find the space to be present, to ask more questions and make fewer statements, to not be a press secretary for society’s woes and missteps when all I want to do is cry.

Come Home

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