Liberation: Not-Made-For-You

It’s a strange moment to realize you’re never going to be free, but that you have to keep on fighting for yourself and others anyway. That even if you won’t get your freedom, you at least want them to have theirs.

It’s that moment where you recognize that you live in a bubble. That the positivity you surround yourself with is but a fragile shield that doesn’t protect you from the rain of realism in the form of arrows from all directions.

Protection is limited. Protection is temporary. If that protection is a loved one, it’s ephemeral, because it is only flesh. If that protection is timely, don’t blink, because all luck runs out eventually. If that protection is mental, just wait, because enough of this world will wear you down.

So what do you do? When you’re Black and queer? Or Black and anything but heterosexual, cis, or a man?

You sit in it. You lay in it. You bathe in it and you don’t wash the bathtub. You leave the ring of filth as a reminder that you won’t ever be clean. You won’t ever be free.

Liberation wasn’t made for you.