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 ...

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...

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-...

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...

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...

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...

I don't believe in suicide, and that makes things a little tricky. It's extreme. I don't want to kill me. But a small part of me, yes, I do. Her name is Shy, and I want her dead.  Shy -- and all the other traits she brings with her (second guessing, waiting, missing opportunities because I simply don't take them) -- is nagging and annoying. She's smothering like a pastor is to his teenage daughter, or like a significant other fishing for some Instagram-worthy PDA.  When I want to be let alone to just do my thing, here Shy comes, hovering over my shoulder like cartoon depictions of Satan. Whispering what-if's into my ear without giving the angel a chance to land on the other side of my mind and tell me go for it. You can do it. What have you got to lose? Go say hi to him. Go ask for a promotion. Start your own passion project. Ask and you shall receive. All that inner encouragement drowned out by the white noise of self-apprehension. Senseless fear and fuz...

MY FIRST TIME ON AMTRAK was more or less painless. I'd done some train travel from NY to Connecticut before, but nothing like this. Nothing like 30 hours across cityscapes, woods and open pastures en route from the heart of Manhattan to New Orleans, Louisiana. To most, the very idea of being train-bound for more than a couple hours is the stuff of nightmares (my friends are still questioning my sanity for doing it), but to me, it was a well-deserved dose of uninterrupted serenity. Observance. A clear mind. Engagement of all the senses. I hear the tinkering of loose gears and panels of the overhead luggage compartments. The crinkling of an aluminum snack bag giving way to a hungry set of hands. The blaring of the vessel's horns piercing the quiet of midnight and dispensing itself across the outskirts of Virginia. The stale and loaded coughs of the woman in the next row with the overly active polyphonic ringtone. Her voice is husky and weary with age. "I'm trying to get...

I never understood why people underestimated "the girlfriends." No, I'm not referring to the ladies lovingly slinked over chiseled biceps, consistently posting flicks of her #MCM and with his name saved as a set of the heart eyed emojis in her phone. I'm talking about the girl-franssss, which nobody wants to proudly claim anymore for some reason.  Last month, I went to two sleepovers. For the first one, my friend had planned for it to be this big thing with facials, manis and pedis, movies and life planning. There ended up only being 6 of us: her, me, her best friend, her co-worker, and her two overly affectionate tabby cats, Vera and Irve (yes, like the designers). I only really knew her well, but I didn't leave feeling that way. We spent hours watching (and then suffering from soured moods from) Winnie Mandela , starting on Sarafina before pausing the movie midway to vent about ain't-shit men and opening up and closing off and how men really fe...

I used to think nothing could top my fear of dying. On most nights after I've tucked myself in, I lie awake staring at the shapes on my ceiling, or sometimes I stare into darkness, not being able to differentiate open eyes from closed. Either way, I'm imagining nothingness. Emptiness. Loss of purpose. Loss of presence. Loss of memory. Loss of soul. Loss of thought. What comes after? What if there's nothing? But I can't recall a "before." Reasoning. Rationalizing. Questioning my religion. Terrified. For years, these nightly thoughts shook me to near-tears. Until recently. The fear of my end got bumped down to the second slot. What about my father's? What will I do when... I try not to think about it. But I know one day, he'll have to leave me, and knowing that hurts. Growing up, all of my closest friends had fathers. Dads. Whether I met them or not, heard fond memories of them or not, the male parents were all there . Between picking us up from sch...

I always found it interesting how much people care for the fictionally wounded on the big screen and shed tears when an actor dies, but when a life is in jeopardy in real life, in real time, nobody knows how to do anything but stand still. I never thought I'd witness that first hand, staring incredulously at onlookers watching a scene straight out of a daytime dramedy. All they needed was the popcorn.  A convulsing individual is laying right there on the ground on the Broadway Junction Station platform and everyone's standing around watching -- some shocked, some amazed -- wondering what happens next. Folks that just got off the Manhattan bound J train stare at the person on the ground (I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman), then at each other, their faces all reading: "So... who's gonna move?"  But the reality is that if anyone moves, they'll miss out on the action. The drama . As if there's a scripted ending prepped and packaged for th...

This weekend was like therapy for me. By the end of it, even though the frigid outdoor temperatures had my thighs and the tips of my fingertips numb, I was warm and tingly inside because I got to reconnect with my real love for the weekend. Photography, honey. For an entire Saturday, I got off my behind and left my borough to put Roscoe Flash (my beloved Canon camera) to work.

Sure I’ve explored the southern shores of Florida before, but it was just fooling around. I never really got my feet wet. It’s always been a transition spot for a cruise, an airport pit-stop or a family trip. It's never been an intimate experience; never hung out there for more than a few hours as a post-21 adult. Until Memorial Day weekend, that is; possibly the most daring weekend to get a little frisky with Miami. Winnie said it best: our first night in Florida was one big knock-knock joke. After almost 48 hours of madness, confusion, the runaround, anti-sobriety agents and a couple standout memories, we sat piled in a hot Volkswagen after getting a jump from the bouncer at the first club we tried to get access into (and clearly failed). At almost 5 am. It was Memorial Day weekend in Miami (and Ft. Lauderdale) and it felt like the hangover in Vegas.

Wow. I was rummaging through my files and found this old thing from junior year of college. I wrote this for Professor Lawrence Kaggwa, arguably one of the most difficult and dream crushing professors in the journalism department. He gives out D's like candy on Halloween. This baby got a B.   It was a joyous occasion. Read and enjoy! 5 p.m. laughter from students freed from final examinations erupts outside of my Howard Plaza Towers dorm room window. It’s a foreign noise to me, having not left my room or hung out with friends in 10 hours. My mouth is dry from reading my Reporting and Writing articles aloud over and over to make sure they sound perfect. My eyelids are sore and heavy from hours glued to my computer screen editing pictures from a photoshoot I did for a classmate’s marketing project. My mind is tired from struggling through Dr. Carr’s book assignment, “Black Marxism” by Cedric Robinson. I am starting to feel defeated.  One more pape...