Dreams

Posted this on Facebook earlier…

I like cold weather. This year and last have robbed me of snow, which always gives me such joy. I feel alive when it’s cold, like I would be ready to fight if necessary. I’ve always felt as though I needed to be ready to fight, and when I’m too hot I feel sluggish. I rarely feel warm and safe with the heat up high when it’s cold outside, because I’ve rarely felt warm and safe anywhere. That’s just part of a story with no particular point except that it’s my story.

I’m at a particular point in my chronology where material things are becoming less and less valuable to me, and I understand that memories are the only things I truly own. Hopefully, I have kept the memories true, and not edited the details because it’s been one hell of a trip. Sometimes I feel as though I have gone nowhere, and other times I feel a million miles away from where I started. The human brain is a strange and wonderful thing – it lies while speaking the truth and it sees when you are asleep.

Being awake is the price we pay for another day in which to dream of tomorrow, but of course, time is a human construct. When a dream dies, it’s not because a timer expired. It’s not a subtle exhale or an unobtrusive sigh. It’s a tortured howl and a guttural wail from the depths of a being that signals the amputation of hope from the spirit. It’s the sound of a gaping hole opening in the soul.

Losing hope is not a silent affair, but it is that inconsolable grief that is an awakening. That’s what it means to be woke, in case anyone wondered. It means to be in constant grief about what has been lost, and what could have been. Woke means you have chosen to let everyone in on the joke – we are not OK, and you are not OK – and that you need to tell the story.

Black History Month doesn’t mean Black people aren’t Black for the remainder of the calendar year. It certainly doesn’t mean that we are living in a post-racial society anywhere in the world. It means we all acknowledge history and that we take a look at how we got here. I believe it means we formally reject the old rationalizations for racism and bias – that Black people have smaller brains, no incentive, no ability to succeed academically or in business.

Hopefully, attention to Black History Month simply means we look around at today’s reality and realize how absurd those paradigms were. We’ll look at the truth of history, no matter how painful, and reframe our definitions of success. Ideally, it means that we begin to dream again how we can live differently and never repeat the absurdity of the social hierarchies we’ve relied on for capitalist profit. We all deserve that.