You're Supposed To Write This

He was looking for a friend. I was looking for silence. My eyes stayed low, focused on my hollowing bag of plantain chips. I had gotten the last pack on the plane and the snack trolley had only gone six rows back. Admittedly, they weren't that interesting to study as they dwindled, those salty slivers I knew I shouldn't be indulging in, but I felt his eyes strong on me, neck craned to the left from his windowless window seat in my direction. But I refused to meet his eyes. Doing so would be a non-verbal contract of on-and-off conversation for the better part of three hours and forty minutes. He already told me about some of his whereabouts. "You going to Guyana?" The vessel was packed to the brim with fussy, impatient, slow-bustling, heavy-tongued and sharp-eyed travelers with Jamaican and Guyanese passports, or those who eventually traded them in for matte, navy blue USA booklets. From the look of me, I would be exiting the plane in Kingston, just like from the look ...

I keep seeing the ghosts of things I've wanted but could never have. I think I have a knack for preparing people for their next best things. Or, at least it always feels that way. And since this is clearly the era of seeing, remembering--frequently, at that--even when you don't want to, I suffer. Memories real and hypothetical wring at my insides. I saw a Him I wanted once in the train station today. He still looked like the gentleman that I knew him to be. Button down shirt, slim jeans, dress boots. Tall and lanky with the swagger of a Harlem trumpeter. A quirky tangle of locks that had nearly doubled in length since we were last in each other's midst. Engaged. Invisibly, of course. You can't tell on the outside--the She was not there--but I know. Thanks to the joy and unwanted charity of social media, and that we remained "friends" on one the most visual platforms of our generation, I see constant proof that the flame I'd hoped for three or so years ag...

my life doesn't feel like my own. it's a funny thing to wake up in the morning, feel around in the darkness with my fingertips, trying to find orientation from the safety of my bed, walk over to the mirror, flick on the lights and see nothing. not literally of course. there i stand, looking back at myself, wiping the crust from my eye corners and staring down a shell. a big ball of empty housed by a brown body prepped for a daily routine of busywork, and a wandering mind, brimming with problems both real and imagined, blocking a purpose.   what am i doing? why am i doing this? wordlessly, the refrain haunts me as i fight morning fatigue, standing soapy under running warm water, fixing eggs and tea, slipping on one shoe then the other, setting foot outside, already looking forward to when that same foot will step back inside the house at the end of the day, and my bed's call will be answered. repeat. i am 28. i am 28 and lost. i am 28 and lost and living like I have to be t...

In 2017, I sat in the pews of three churches or the rows of fancy reception halls watching two people in love become one union. And for the weddings I didn’t attend, I saw enough of the ceremony on social media to make me feel like I was there, dodging the thrown bouquet per usual. I always wonder if their special day came close to (or exceeded) what they drummed up in their dreams prior to. Culturally, we joke and say that from youth, us women, prayerful brides-to-be, spend years planning for their weddings, regardless of if the husband part of the equation has been factored in yet. We know the style and cut of engagement rings, possible surprise engagement scenarios, the type of dress and hair, locations and venues, months, seasons, guest lists, table decor, honeymoons, you name it. And it’s a fun and wonderful thing to imagine. I love to chime in to the building of this fantasy as, through age, we inch towards their realities. All my life I’ve wanted to become a best friend turned...

This is not a typical trip review with do's and don'ts, but a inward reflection and the sights and sounds of my trip. Glimpses of recommended places to go are bolded throughout. I haven't sat in a rocking chair in years. Or not in recent memory, at least. The thought of rocking chairs is paired with ages high in numbers, the bodies of whom are rich in wisdom and memoirs hidden behind tired, wrinkled eyes. Vaudeville films flashing of a life wholly lived. That, and inner peace. Tranquility. Satisfaction with the way things are and a sound peace of mind. The swaying forward and backward moving to the natural metronome of the heartbeat. Back, forth, back, forth. The rhythm is just so. No missteps until it is time to get up. My time in Cuba has treated me well, offering me that stillness I couldn't achieve prior. That content and ease. Betty [of Chez Betty ] and Abuela ("Alla," as Betty would call down the hallway at any given time) and mama have opened t...

Lying is really easy, disgustingly so at times. But even more than it is a fleeting trick, lying is unhealthy. Especially if you're lying to yourself at the same frequency that you're misleading others with the things you say and the way you behave. So, I'm going to be honest with myself for a change. My eternal quest is to not just find happiness, but to find it exclusively within myself. You should see all the self-love quotes that decorate all 12 of my journals and occupy the back of my door in Post-It form. My living space literally looks like a scene out of Being Mary Jane . I know that in order to attract love in my life, I must be totally okay and in love with myself first. But honestly, honestly , a huge factor in my self-love quest is my body and loving that. It's... okay. I don't hate it. It could be much worse, but I don't love it. It's functional and, as far as I know, has gotten the technical thumbs up from my doctors, but I don't love i...

After the first flight and first layover, I was less anxious and annoyed than I had planned to be. In fact, I was smiling. Subtly, of course. I expected to feel alone, lost, vulnerable, but sitting on that plane from Panama City to Sao Paulo, I was everything but. New York spoiled me, yes, but whether I thought it did or not, it prepared me to look at myself as a global citizen. Sitting on the train and walking down crowded city streets in different boroughs, it’s uncommon to only hear one tongue spoken in passing. There will be conversations that you technically can’t understand or jump into, but you feel it.  Foreign sentences don’t feel foreign, so sitting in this aisle seat hearing a black man speak in Portuguese—a language my ear was never trained for—to a white Brazilian after being told “Gracias” by an ethnically ambiguous fellow while in Panama’s airport felt like magic. I don’t feel lost even though I don’t fully know what they’re saying; I feel enamored. Inspired. Ju...

Contrary to the current state of the nation and how it tries to tell our story—when "all lives" desperately try to smudge out our melanin like a bad eraser wasting space on a No. 2 pencil, but we go no where—I love my blackness more than anything. I love the way we have the strength not only to pray, hard and unyielding, but to forgive even when it doesn't feel deserved. When it isn't deserved, point blank period. I love how we sound when joined together in song, whether organized or by impulse, the natural harmonies that arise and the feelings that permeate from those choral moments onto any ears nearby. I love how dramatic we are, how we tell stories and our eyes wrinkle and out brows furrow, and the way our hands move when retelling even the simplest of anecdotes. Bodies swaying with narration. I love our sweetness, our sass, our sarcasm, our wit, our sharp tongues, our sympathy. I love our skin and how it glistens and glows, not burns and reddens, in th...

For those who are sad, Chance the Rapper's music is the antidote. I did not watch the ESPYs last night with the rest of the world (namely with Black Twitter). On one part, I don't have cable because I'm cheap, so there's that. But really, instead I was busy being sad. Sulking over personal trivialities that feel like mountains underneath the magnifying glass that comes with living in the swallowing oasis that is New York City. I went to sleep moody and woke up with an annoyance that set it off again. But what I was sad about isn't as important as what pulled me out of it.  My terrible digital-based-job-having-self habit is waking up, rolling out of bed and into the glow of my iPhone screen, scanning through both work and personal inboxes, texts and social feeds to see what I missed in those hours I was seeing black. As I scrolled past Carmelo Anthony and friends standing in solidarity for the Black Lives Matter movement, Devon Still posing with his cancer-...

Maybe one day I will... ----- I'm truly not a fan of nature. The last two weeks have confirmed this to me. The itch and sting of swelling bites and blisters on my skin have confirmed this to me. The crack of dawn chorus of distressed howler monkeys, plummeting coconuts on my thatched roof and the roar of jungle rain each and every morning have confirmed this. Yet here I am surrounded by trees on all sides in a bungalow without air conditioning and flimsy mosquito nets feeling my skin become oily with sweat and humidity, sticking to the pillows of this bed, and Ted isn't even here. He's the whole reason I flew down here to Puerto Viejo. "Sam, let's take a different kind of vacation, you and me. Less party, more peaceful." We don't need a trip, we need a counselor , I'd thought at the time, but instead I nodded wearily and headed back to the bedroom to await details on the trip he just KNEW I'd love, because there's no "no" for Ted....

What A Time. It's the first of the last 24 hours before I have to change the calendar on my wall. There's a hole in the left underarm of my sleep shirt and my sweatpants are borrowed from my sister, who's fast asleep across the home. Even though I have a cozy Brooklyn abode of my own, I'm in my home home with my nuclear family, in my big bed swaddled in linty, overly fuzzy blankets, thinking about how wild of a ride 2015 was. And I am smiling. A lot. The last time I even checked into this blog was damn near eight months ago. Absurdity. I thank God that I was so busy living that I hardly had the time to reflect outside of Twitter and inconsistent pen-to-paper diary entries. Living as in doubting, believing, struggling, seeing, crying, flying, moving, doing, being, succeeding. I've experienced every emotion and every sensation there was to be had, which is an amazing feeling. At the top of it all, I am grateful for life. To be aboveground. Breathing, unassiste...

Hopefully the title explains this well enough. I just wrote as I went, so take it as it is. Pure backpackers boarded my second plane. They all had overwhelming duffles and cumbersome knapsacks, thermoses hanging off of dusty Jansports and those heavy duty athletic sandals good for hiking and climbing over rocks. They were tan, not the beach kind of tan, red and leathery, but a healthy brown (for white) like they spent most of their time outside in parks and on nature trails. I would imagine that they smelled like earth. They had laid back buns and pony tails and white corn rows and boho skirts and billowing harem pants and guitars to strum around bonfires and those colorful hipster string necklaces you grab from a small country's local markets. All smiling and chattering down the length of the aircraft. "I like your hair," one said to me as she slowly passed my coarse twists. -- These flights have been superb lately. Super smooth with very little jitters on...

It's warmer than I expected up here. And calmer. The sun is strong on my arm through the slit of my window seat, magnified as it rises high over the Earth I'm not touching. Just two hours ago, I was freezing, my pores raised high on my even skin and my hairs standing straight. One degree outside, I believed, but I came outside dressed for 65 so that when 77 hit me in the face, it'd be a smoother transition. There's no one sitting in between me and Ms. Matilda. Okay, I'm more than positive that isn't this older woman's name, but her stature is sweet and her nature warm, like a Matilda. When I first climbed into 18A and she in seat C, she turned to me with a smile (and I returned a half one as I was greedily slurping meh-seasoned chicken soup from a plastic spoon), saying, "Now, is that as delicious as it looks and smells?" "Not really," I replied with a laugh, before she insisted it must be better than the hardboiled egg she had for ...

The moment I turned 24, I was already anxious and excited to turn 25. It just seemed like the IT age to be, and not just because 25 is such a perfectly rounded out number (that helps). By looking at my circle of friends and college alumni and other people I look up to, wonderful things seem to happen around that age. Not necessarily riches, fame and marriage, but smaller things that help build to whatever their definition of happiness entails. Progress. Confidence. Freedom. Movement. Thrill. Fluidity. Experimentation. Risk. Comfort. Discomfort. Spontaneity. Newness. All things that I can already feel happening in 2015, and luckily for me, my birthday is at the top of the year. So, before I fully jumped into my new quarter century skin, I wanted to take a moments to discover my self more with another challenge: #QuarterPieceOfMe. It's similar to #30DaysOfSELF in that it is a creative self-portrait challenge that I forced myself to stick to daily. But it's different in that t...

Humans are never a bore. An annoyance maybe when it comes to common sense, or a disappointment when it comes to morality, but there's nothing to get you thinking and feeling more than the human race. Sure, teacup-sized animals with pillow soft fur might make you awww a bit and the mysteries and deep open spaces of unexplored nature have you marveling, but the flesh and blood that we brush shoulders with daily, or the funny habits we squint our eyes at when we are privileged enough to catch a quick glance, never cause a dull moment. Especially in New York, where the time gaps in between memorable human encounters is almost as short as our patience being in close quarters with them.  This week alone has been full of blog-worthy encounters and non-encounters with the city's quiet inhabitants, and it's been fascinating. For instance, there was the scruffily dressed, dreadlocked man in line at the Bank of America on 7th Avenue, whose staff know him on a first name basi...

By the end of each year, we flip back on old blog posts and diary pages to look at what we were so adamant about changing (or not changing) about ourselves. Praying that some inner or outer transformations occurred, trust circles shrunk and expanded, and that we know an ounce more about ourselves than we did 365 days ago. It's fun to wonder and revisit the mindset you left behind or lifted off with before all the confetti fell.   I was flapping my gums about honoring and focusing on me this year, and I think I've lived up to that more or less. I've experienced some serious highs and lows this year, channeling both sets of emotions into understanding not only my needs and wants, but how others factor into creating said emotions. A year of focus on myself turned into even greater lessons about the people I'm surrounded by. Whether I liked it at the time or not, outside elements and personalities really helped me learn about my abilities, my distractions, my limits an...

We sat in silence, absentmindedly eyeing the backs of the wooly bus seats in front of us, occasionally stealing glances at the greenery whizzing by on our ride up from the Atlanta to New York City. Our hands were were clumsily linked at the fingers and rested on the lump of jackets between our laps. Dumb smiles plastered our 16- and 17-year-old faces. That moment could've easily been an awkward silence. But it wasn't, because just moments before, he'd asked me to be his girlfriend. And I said yes. Before that two-week college tour spent under loose adult supervision, he and I had said no more than a few words during brief hallway huddles with mutual friends. We were simply colleagues. In time, I'd learn that the L-word was more than just part of a Hallmark card greeting and the quiet, dreadlocked boy who sat on the other side of Ms. Medlin's English class would eventually claim ownership of my heart. I can't really recall the moment I said I love you fo...

This is old, very old. So old that I'm not sure if I like it anymore, so here. LOCKDOWN  I must have come on a super busy day. The struggles-of-a-baby-mama and I-hate-my-job chatter around me and the static-ridden television set showing an old episode of All My Children were hard to drown out. The smell of acrylic was making my head hurt and the short Asian man scrubbing the bottom of my feet tickled like all hell. My phone had been buzzing for damn near ten minutes and I couldn’t dig into my pocket to answer it for fear of ruining my French mani.  None of that could keep my mind from retreating to one thought and stirring up a week’s worth of worry. The only thing on my mind was how, ultimately, one word had turned into a life sentence. How could I have let that happen?  I scooped up my purse, tucked it under my arm and blew at my fingernails while being led to the nail drying station. “Careful! No touch!” my manicurist snapped at me. “Sorry, sorry,” I sai...

I don't know shxt, and there's nothing I hate more than that. Answers are worth more than money. They'd solve all the world's problems. Most importantly, they'd solve all of my damn problems. Every last inner quarrel I have with myself about the way to approach a challenge. Or not approach it. Foreshadowing outcomes before I prioritize my workload. Putting a timestamp on my patience. The best time to take a leap of faith. The common void in these situations? Answers, answers, answers. As elusive as Mariah's vocal prowess right about now.  It's like, when people ask me what I am, what I do, where I want to be, how I plan to get there and my ultimate goals, I can never hit them with a straight answer in under five seconds. I stop and fidget, trying to encapsulate my dreams and hopes and swirl of ideas running through my mind a mile a minute into one concise sentence. It usually comes out as a stammer of inaudible words, then "a lot" or "...

this one's short. i need to know more people. i know people think that having "too many friends" is a thing, but that's stupid. limited. safe. why wouldn't you want to have someone to dial-up other than the regulars you toss back Henny shots with or the members of your graduating class? someone that has an area code you'd have to google search because they're that unfamiliar? someone to be your artistic muse? someone to see you as their artistic muse? someone who makes fun of your accent and tries to imitate it after you reciprocate the joke? someone to respectfully question your ideals and beliefs and offer insight into how they were raised because it's so different from your upbringing. someone who's skills sets don't align with yours at all, but that doesn't make them any less interesting? someone who's god-given talent is damn near otherworldly and secretly you're hoping that a shard of it will catch on to you with continue...