leap years, almost three months, some days
Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899)
It’s a taurus Tuesday night, I stand in the kitchen and watch water boil, oblivious to everything but the Friday afternoon I was caught shoplifting at the East Lake Publix wearing my Boy Scout uniform. It must have been 2011, because everything happened to me when I was 15 years old. Troop 706, I was decked in full paraphernalia- sash, patches, boots, neckerchief, handbook. I led a Cub Scout troop after-school, for five dollars a meeting, about once a week and we were going to Bert Adams campsite for the weekend. No money, no snacks. A simple calculus, but I was not stealing out of hunger or necessity. Gushers, chips, cookies, halal marshmallows, gatorade. The man who caught me was an older brother from the masjid and a plain-clothes employee of the grocery store disguised as a shopper. I was crouched over my bookbag, shifting loot when I heard his voice from behind:
“What are you doing man?”
I stopped, startled, and tried to offer an explanation or a lie but nothing came. He encouraged me to give him the stuff and he sent me on my way without alerting management. An unpronounced sin, a silent transgression. Over the coming months, I saw the man at the masjid on occasion and he was sure to ask me questions about myself. He learned I wanted to be a writer (always) and invited comparisons to great Black American scribes, exalting me as “the next James Baldwin.” I wasn’t familiar with Baldwin at the time, likely unschooled in his oeuvre because of Baldwin’s sexuality. For years the brother told me three things every time we spoke: that he’d buy my book when it came out, that we should go fishing, and that I would be the next James Baldwin.
By that point I had written four books in composition journals cover to cover, while I was supposed to be doing my math classwork. I thought I knew all these things I simply didn’t and had only been fishing once, on a different Boy Scout trip with a bunch of other east side Black boys. I was the only one to catch a fish. My first experiences reading Baldwin were still a few years out. We never went fishing together, he and I.
I’m no Baldwin.
Lately, I’ve taken to watching basketball on mute. I don’t really understand why, the crowd and the calls are among my favorite aspects of the viewing experience but this deprivation helps me think. The players on screen, while familiar due to my unrelenting passion for watching the sport, don't seem to belong to me the way the players of my youth did. And the new players are getting the older players out of here, quickly. LeBron, Durant, Curry, Westbrook, Kawhi, Lillard, Harden. None advanced past the first round. I actively rooted against some of these players in years past and now, as they fail to live up to their former glory, I sink into my couch feeling sorry for the time where my allegiances lie and silly about my sorriness. The feeling isn't completely foreign, 2012 was also a significant changing of the guard. Similar emotions found me when I watched the young OKC Thunder overwhelm Kobe and the Lakers (Dirk and Timmy too) and when LeBron vanquished the Big 3 Celtics once and for all. Watching them come to age around the same time as I felt important and I found kinship in that. Now watching them go out of fashion (more gracefully than ones from before), I still feel a guttural hunger to become, wondering if my best days have already passed me by.
I remember the summer of 2012, when my older brothers and I rode around Kansas City with a basketball goal and four fifty-pound sandbags fastened to the back of my Dad’s forest green pickup truck, hunting basketball games. Twice that summer, our family reunion and July 4th, those games ended with bullets and the threat, the loud whisper of death. I recall college nights spent in ritual at the free throw line: I needed to make ten consecutive before I could sleep. The routine was born from a desire to gather my thoughts, more meditation than practice.
I listen to “Euphoria” by Kendrick Lamar. It feels like an important moment in the history of Hip Hop. I think of my brother’s ‘95 Thunderbird and the backseat, where I fell in love with rap music for the second time at 15, bumping bootleg copies of Watch The Throne and Tha Carter IV. Memories of music rock me back and forth through time like an aimless dinghy at sea a la Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream. “Tomorrow” by The Brothers Johnson: I’m walking under the rain in Boerum Hill. “Hold Me Down” by Daniel Caesar: I’m having dorm room sex. “Don’t Worry About A Thing” by Stevie Wonder: I’m rounding the corner on Wesley Chapel Road, leaving my love for the final time before moving to New York City. “Green Eyes” by Erykah Badu: the sun sets in Rome. “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell: downcast eyes look in the mirror and recognize the years on my face. Big smile. Age has come, rebellion wanes… it must not die.
Pathology, the science of causes and effects (of disease). I’ve been toying with the idea of sacred lightning, memories there only for a moment but powerful as all hell. Like a last kiss unfurling back to the first one. Images of Anton Ego finding his mother in the first bite of Remy’s ratatouille comes to mind (Ratatouille, 2007). I wonder where the years have gone and what they’ve brought me aside from this sacred lightning. Where are my lessons? I’m still trying to be gentle first and honest later, still refusing help, still needing it, just still. Lightning must beget thunder. Distant, solitary, stony, punctual, lingering thunder.
Whenever my mother and I visit her old friends, they always describe me as “the crybaby.” Momma got hella kids so that serves as their key differentiator. They regale me with tales of my never ending infant sobs. I don’t remember those years, but I remained quick to cry as years went by and without shame. In middle school I’d weep at my desk when I got C grades, arm crossed over my face like Cabanel’s Fallen Angel. The tears were never happy; usually brought on by melancholy, movies, music, heartbreak, or infrequent madness. As of now, I have not cried since February 29th, 2024. 80 days. February 29th, a date that would not have happened any of the past three years. The leap year tears were brought on during a viewing of Rosewood (1997), summoned by an anger concerning the heavy content of the plot rather than any malfunction in my own life therefore not belonging to me. Still, it’s the only time I have cried this year. As my life falls apart (since I’ve become 28), cries swell in my spirit like a sneeze that won’t come out. I’m drowning in things unsaid. Desire, admission, disappointment. I don’t think I’ve given myself permission to win, as most writers haven’t (word to Toni Morrison), but I refuse to lose. Mostly though, there is a general anxiety cloaking everything I have akin to a stillwater marsh hiding cattail stalks. I’m like Captain Hook being chased by the ticking crocodile. Tick tick tick tick tick.
The water boils. I’m at the mouth of my kitchen compiling notes for my first novel, feeling like unsigned hype. I crack the spine of Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and jot down a phrase shared early in the first chapter: “People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.” I finger the boldly inked underline, humming the words along its imprint. My eyes threaten tears but they don’t come. Some days I think they’ll never come again. Being a young, sometimes angry Black man is a strange panic and I need my tears now more than ever. I’ve been told to toughen up, stop crying, and be a man my whole life and now I’m all dried up. It’s making me miserable. Life’s too hard to be strong, unloved, and alone. Il faut choisir une lutte.
I think I’ve got my hands on the steering wheel though. I’m eating my veggies, getting some sunlight, listening to music, telling my people I love them. As far as matters of control, I’ve learned that it’s a circular prism and at each end, things are either too big or too small for me to hold in these hands.
No fear. The world ends any day now.
Alexandre Cabanel, The Fallen Angel (1847)
published May 19, 2024
