so basically there are 7 people of color at my new job. 3 are married, 3 are gay men. and me.
i didn't think this would affect me as much as it has. relatively, i mean. there are many more urgent, pressing matters to toil over and contemplate. like how i'm going to live on my salary and the fact that every other day i am regaled with stories of or experience secondarily petty violence. part of me wishes someone would grab me or hit me, just so i could let go and allow it to happen.
this entire city was built on a grid that's turned on its axis, making it extremely difficult to navigate and supremely intimidating to approach. i've got the ten block radius around my house figured out well enough to get me home but i look at all the flat, tree-lined one-ways and get tired. not because it isn't pretty here or there aren't little enclaves of young professional people of color that i see dotting the landscape of twenty-something venues or anything. because i do.
you ever start something that is so overwhelming that you immediately feel as though you've been doing it your entire life? like, you can't remember a time when you weren't doing it? and it changes the way you speak and how you plan and what you wear and how you move? i want to romanticize the past but all i see is what i do and all i do is how i see.
suddenly i have a calendar and an assistant (shared) and meetings and international calls and dinners that i decline with the hope that i can sit down and think about anything but everything. still, i lose sleep flipping through my mental indexes of protocol and knowledge.
i haven't watched the news since the second day i was here because there's no time and i feel utterly at the mercy of elements beyond my control. when i wake up i try to gauge things like the weather or traffic or world events by how i'm feeling and what the light is like through my windows.
and i'm one of five. again.
i was told about one of my predecessors. a vibrant young black woman whose talents were boundless and whose reputation begat accolades of her being THE NEXT BIG THING. and she walked away from it all. she couldn't take it. what she does now isn't important.
i don't know where i'm going with any of this but as i type all the lights are off in my apartment because i don't want to turn them on, and the oppressive cold of the forthcoming winter is making the breath from my nose dissipate before it can actually cause a warming sensation on my upper lip. but i can't see the moisture escaping me in just the light of my computer screen. i feel everything, though.
there's this funny thing where i'm meant to neatly compartmentalize everything that streams through my recently promoted creative mind into a litany of decadently verbose prose that delights the most contemporary of practitioners but i find myself preferring not to speak. i've yet to really comprehend where my voice fits into this well-designed and beautiful mausoleum of craft and concept. i think about my own ambition for mobility, for freedom, and suddenly i can't hear that same music or see that same painting without a part of me drifting just to drift.
but i produce, manically, these things that i'm not going to call ideas yet. i'll call them documents.
and it's cold.
i need to turn on the lights.
peace,