Cocoon Prose
Update: Still journeying. Still loading; still marinating, still decorating cocoon walls. No longer afraid, no longer impatient, no longer anxious. When you become accustomed to chaos the stillness of nothings imitates safety. Days where joy meets you as a stranger come few and far between, and tragedy descends upon joy with vultured precision every fifteen minutes; joy never looks like the girl in the mirror. The girl in the mirror always looks like the girl on the news.
Even numbness is a feeling. Trying to forget pain feels very much like remembering it twice. Forgetting how to breathe is not the same as holding your breath.
This country kills Black women. This country opposes Black life. Tests our mortality, tries to extinguish people of embers; blatant audacity always attempting to smother greatness, smudge out miracles, intercept flame’s relighting— it is as if we shine bright enough to both light the way ahead, and let our ancestors know that somehow, in some way, we made it. Fire is marveled at, used for all its worth and then killed before it recognizes its strength for destruction. This country is a sealed jar and a moth to a flame.
I’ve been afraid to write from my heart while it is broken. Fearful of lines breaking just the same. There is no perfect way to capture anguish, to spill frustration onto all blank pages, translation for miles and miles of hurt inside of somebody. Some days you feel like you’ll overflow, it feels like you’ve left the bath running. Some days you’ll feel empty, absent, pricked and deflated. So hollow that if you cry, you’ll become the promise of a wishing well. Cry, then. You deserve your safe space.
This mourning, I do not pretend. It is familiar; devastation runs from the top of your head down to the soles of your feet, pooling around you as you walk. I won’t lie, I feel stepped in. What do I say to the rest of us— always stepped in, always forced to morph, always written off, ignored, endangered, always criminalized? Always martyred.
This mourning, Black women deserve better is all I can muster. Imagine deserving the world while it burdens between your shoulder blades. Life, tortured into something far too heavy to carry. Evil, just a screen or scream away. This mourning I cannot wear the face of a fool; will not claim the wool pulled over my eyes as my own. I will not sacrifice my healing for those who continue to cut me; will not donate to those who steal my pieces and tell me that to not be whole is to be unwanted. This mourning, I want myself and I will not share.
Being Black, woman, above ground— everyone says how strong you are for enduring these wars. Nobody says, “Take off your armor.” Nobody tells you that you have to sleep in it, too.
