Dear Richard Collins

Day 20

Dear Richard Collins,

We never had a chance to meet, though I feel like I know you. On the early morning of Saturday, May 20, 2017, I just dropped my sister off to her apartment which was across the street from the University of Maryland. Roughly 12 hours later she graduated with a degree in theater. This fall she will begin pursuing her MFA at the prestigious American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. My entire family celebrated with her that Saturday. We listened to music, ate good food and offered her toasts through tears and laughter. We told her the world was hers and believed it.

Why am I telling you this? I’m not entirely sure but I think it’s because you remind me of my sister. Like her, you were meant to shine. Though you both were on wildly different career paths, you both possessed similar characteristics. From your pictures I can tell you were determined yet gentle, like my sister. Somehow you both managed to elude the childish arrogance that often comes with the new found freedom at your age. You were about and meant to change something.

When I dropped my sister off early that Saturday morning, you both were silently and humbly waiting for your respective college bubbles to open up so you could be released into the world to make your mark. Roughly two and a half hours after I dropped my sister off and no more than a few miles away (if that), your life was taken away senselessly. By hate. By insecurity. By weakness. By everything you were not.

Instead of your family telling you how proud they are of you, they are forced to tell you how much they’ll miss you. Your mother will taste tears of a different kind. Nothing I could ever dream of saying will comfort your family. I won’t try but I do want you to know that you were loved. I can tell you had love in your life. You were either given a lot of love or you doled it out with no strings attached or both. Probably both. You had black boy joy.

I’m not going to get political because today we mourn you and your promise. Tomorrow, I’ll fight for you. But today, I mourn you. And because we don’t say it enough, black man to black man, I love you. I just wish that was enough.

Love,

Emmanuel Brown