My Name

My name? Please, I have identity issues.

If you were looking for AA, it’s down the hall to your right. This is a member’s only club.

So secret, so exclusive in fact that it’s just you, alone. Screaming at the voices in your head that plague you at night.

Maybe you’re crazy. You’ve considered this a lot. At least it would provide some kind of diagnosable, explainable explanation for what you’re going through.

What are you going through? You haven’t even been able to put it into words until now. Besides, who would believe you? You’d only become another attention seeking whore that instagrams her new ‘stay strong’ tattoo.

Staying strong. I write about strength a lot- #BlackLivesMatter, fuck your body standards, I’m the poster girl for I don’t-give-a-damn-what-you-think. But I do. I care who you think I am, because me, myself and I have no idea.

I haven’t the faintest clue how to be black or to be white, I remain in the dark. Neither side can see me but I’m sure they talk in a language I cannot understand. So I’m allowed to have braids but I’m not allowed to talk about black people being gunned down in the street? Is that what you’re saying?

But there I am. In the middle of nightclub, in the peak of 12am vodka flavoured sweat. I am the lightskin girl from the hip hop music video. I your black girl without any of the trouble. I am sexy and exotic, and I don’t have a mind of my own because all the body mass has gone to my butt, which I use to twerk with. Maybe I am the girl of your dreams but you don’t want a relationship with me. I’m far too dangerous.

So I cry. I eat chocolate. I watch rom coms even though I don’t understand them because I’m frantically searching for a woman I can associate with. So I eat more until I feel disgusted with myself. I look in the mirror and I can no longer see the light between my eyes but the gap between my thighs and I’m in love with it. So I run for miles until I think I might throw up. And then I do throw up later, the chocolate cake that I ate in a moment of weakness.

In my weakness I become lazy, and solve this by scrolling through Instagram. I am swamped by the same images of skinny white girls dancing like they’re twenty two that they have now become transparent. I no longer care. I watch Formation and see Beyonce and Serena Williams, and they don’t have thigh gaps and they seem happy. Free. Woke. For a minute, I think that I can be happy too. And then I remind myself that I am the lightskin girl in the hip hop music video with the coke bottle figure, and I cannot break from character. I’d be out of a job.

So I run further, and then I see Alicia Keys preaching natural beauty and I stop. I see a black guy leering at my ass in the club and I start running again. Then I see two black men getting gunned down by police officers in the space of one week and I can take it no more I cannot breathe and I collapse.

Look what you’ve done to me.

What are you going to say at my funeral now that you’ve killed me?

Here lies the body of the love of my life whose heart I broke without a gun to my head.

Here lies the mother of my children, both living and dead.

Rest in peace my true love, who I took for granted, most bomb pussy;

Who because of me, sleep evaded;

Her shroud is loneliness, her God was listening

Her heaven will be a love without betrayal

Ashes to ashes; dust to side chicks.