what are you waiting for?

jes skolnik
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read

[This piece was written for 20x2: What Are You Waiting For?]

I would like to wake up in the morning able to breathe. It’s gotten particularly acute since last November, though it’s by no means new; I might as well have been born with it, this skeleton made of iron ore. I don’t swim because I feel like i’d sink. Clenched jaw, muscles coiled.

Safety? What is that? The closest thing I have is at the end of the night, curled against my partner’s chest with one of their arms folded around me. I listen to their steady heart and think about blind just-born kittens squirming against their mother’s warmth, about the trust you need to have when you’re that vulnerable. How when I was a blind kitten I wasn’t just abandoned but exploited. Here, in the dark, I nestle closer and feel thankful that someone loves me enough to hold me like this, when we’re both defenseless.

I think about bad news. I think about missing friends and unsolved cases. I grew up non-black in a black city. I think about my short time behind bars, fingerprinted for civil disobedience and let go with a ticket and occasional mild annoyance at border crossing, versus the way security guards looked at my friends as we spilled out of school into a convenience store to buy candy, the way those grown men’s hands went to the guns at their waists. I think about how much responsibility I have and swell with the wish to throw my own body in front of that bullet. In other circumstances, I am afraid for myself. In this one, I am happy to die if someone else may live. That one’s a no-brainer. Wouldn’t you do that for someone you cared about?

You pay with your life, voluntarily or not. The empire eats these sacrifices. Their mouths are bloody while they legislate our worth and our iron bones are smelted for the hotels that bear their names.

I think about a group of young white boys coming toward me on the street. I can’t tell whether they’ll grab or jeer. “What are you, a boy or a girl?’ or ‘Fat bitch.’ I think about a similar group of young white boys in the corridor in my high school rating everyone who walked past, and when I slunk by, trying not to be seen, one shouted ‘I’d fuck you if I put a bag over your head first,’ and another laughed and agreed, ‘Nice tits,’ reaching out for them. Were they the same anonymous team who scrawled DYKE on my locker the next year? (They were right, but it felt like a death threat.) Hate is all around.

I wait for the moment when we can all rise relaxed into a world that isn’t feverishly trying to erase us. I wait to feel safe — for all of us to feel safe, an invisible arm around each of us, a heartbeat, warmth: you are loved, you matter.

    jes skolnik

    Written by

    noise prince/ss. @bandcamp daily managing editor. gay as in gay, intersex as in intersex. opinions belong to my loud mouth only.