As if the self could be a departure, even if only through a fresh grief, that would be a returning and a beginning.     As if the water that I am might find a better form, rise above, in a body composed of something other than lust and sorrow, or simply slip down into this water, which atones, and forgets, and need not speak.

The dirty secret of Black life is that, for all the existentialist angst that Mailer correctly identified in a generation of White hipsters who sought the coolness of “living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy” – because it produced great art and a consumable experience with the edge – most Black folk don’t live those lives, whether captured in the grimy photography of 1950s realism or Kayne and Kim’s Instagram accounts.   If we are being honest, exceptional Blackness never gets you killed; spectacular Blackness never gets you killed. Death is witnessed by Blackness in the singularly unremarkable and unexceptional: selling cigarettes, smoking a cigarette in your own car, reckless eyeballing in the 21st century mid-Atlantic city, playing in the park, your car breaking down on the side of the road. 8 years into a Black presidency, 16 years into the 21st century – a future that was depicted in many of our childhoods as a time of flying cars, and if we watched the first generation of The Jetsons, apparently no Black people – these deaths, the so many of them that have visited Blackness are not remarkable, spectacular, or exceptional, but rather mundane. These deaths, the so many of them, are  as mundane as driving your family around in a car, that you knew might breakdown on you one evening on the side of the road, that you neither possessed the time nor money to have repaired because that is what a mundane existence is.  That something so mundane might get you killed – targeted by the State, no less – speaks to absurdity of Black life, and even that absurdity has become mundane.

I want you to know that life will try to crack you like an egg, and your silence will eventually break. Someday you will spill some of those painful secrets and taste a modicum of much-needed freedom. You will lose a great deal as a result, but the gains will outweigh every loss. You will love and be loved by a beautiful man in a place where your mutual passion will be a marker not of shame but of pride. You will be awkward and alone and alien for a long time, but you will transform these qualities, which is to say yourself, into a work of art. You will wear your awkwardness, your aloneness and your alienness in your hair like gold thread. You will adorn your wonkiness on your wrist like a charm bracelet studded with stars. Someday you will no longer be as scared as you are now. Someday you will understand that it’s OK to not be cool, that it’s fine to wear your heart on your sleeve, that it doesn’t matter if you belt out the theme tune to Space Jam while you wait for the bus. Someday you will stop crying in your sleep, and the anxiety that rips your heart open whenever you see the police will cease. Someday you will have your own home, and you will draw fashion illustrations on the walls and the kitchen cupboards to remind you of your 13-year-old self. Someday you will walk down the street with a sense of achievement and self-contained confidence. Someday you will create your own family. Someday you will measure your life not in terms of modest gains but by major wins. Someday you will grow up and become the man you have always wanted to be.