Living Monologues | Nori
Photo by Jessica Felicio on Unsplash
This monologue is pure fiction and part of my ongoing Living Monologues Series that explores who we are beneath our words.
I never saw the rubber bullet coming. Now my bottom lip looks like it was split in two even after healing. I was just going to wait for it to heal before I went back to Ferguson.
I thought that timeframe would help me shake what I’d seen enough to go back. But I just kept remembering what happened to Joshua and Seals. They weren’t just killed, they were brutalized. Lynched like it’s 1892. The body of an activist left burning in a car? It scared me. I let it scare me into sitting down and shutting up for nearly four months. Stunned into stillness. And not the kind you willingly walk into to find some things you left. I was in the middle of the kind of stillness born of fear and things unknown. Everyone else kept marching but not me. I couldn’t march through the fear so I flew back to New York to sit mute.
For nearly four months.
Abe sat with me some days when he could finagle working from home. Lord love him. He carried on our normal way of life in the apartment. Every morning, he brewed delicious coffee and handed me a mugful. I sipped even though mourning had pried the taste for our bougie artisan coffee from my mouth. He changed out the fresh flowers on the dining table every week like I had done since we moved in two years prior. And it wasn’t that he was trying to deny what I’d gone through. He later told me he kept up our daily routines because he didn’t want anything to take away our everyday lives. He didn’t want anything to have the power to steal our moments. Our rituals.
He called my mother and told her that I needed prayer. It was the first proper laugh I’d had since everything happened. I snorted and laughed when he confessed it to me a week or so later. I cackled so hard he started to chuckle. Took his glasses off to wipe his eyes, he laughed so hard. I laughed a little too hard. My lip that had started to heal, split again and blood dribbled down my chin. I didn’t notice until Abe stopped laughing. He was looking at my white t-shirt. I glanced down and then up at him then back down then back up. Panic was rising but wasn’t making its full appearance. The blood was spreading on my shirt like a river and its tributaries. Before Abe could try to take care of me at that moment, I ran into the bathroom, stuck my face into the sink and ran cool water over my mouth.
You don’t see rubber bullets coming. You just feel them. I will never have the feeling back in my lip. I wonder about my insides some days. The parts the rubber bullets couldn’t touch. The parts of me that what I witnessed had smeared its hateful hands on.
When I came out of the bathroom I curled up next to him on the couch and told him there was still room at the cross for him if he wanted to go down to Bethel House of Faith and get saved. He just smiled, kissed the top of my matted twists, and wrapped his arms and legs around me. We didn’t say anything else to each other that night. I knew he had to love me to call my mother.
Imagine it. My Jewish-in-lineage-only boyfriend with whom I am three years deep living in sin, called my Pentecostal pastor mother to pray for me. He told her how much I weigh and that I wasn’t eating enough. I know I scared him pretty badly for him to do that. Abe stays as far from religion as he can get including his own. The most Jewish he’s ever been in my presence was in driving from our place in Brooklyn into Manhattan to get us “proper” pastrami sandwiches from 2nd Avenue. He won’t abide bad kosher meats.
I feel the weight of being too weak a woman to stay in Ferguson and fight alongside my brothers and sisters. I tucked tail and flew back East, to the comforts of home with a white man. That sits on my chest. And my love for him beats inside it.
I don’t know why he put the phone on speaker, but he did and he sat there with me while my mother and my Aunt Melody took turns praying over me. He didn’t close his eyes but he bowed his head like he was looking for God to say something to him too. And I’d bet that something said did touch him. You can’t summon healers, even if only for someone else, and not activate even the smallest measure of healing for yourself.
That meant something to me. I think he’s trying to make up for the times he didn’t believe all of my frustration and anger were warranted. We fought. I broke a thing or two. Sometimes I’m embarrassed that I stayed with him and explained things over and over again. I didn’t have to. But I loved him. So I explained. And I cried. And he didn’t get it…until I told him about Cousin Tee. Until I told him what I stood in the middle of the street and screamed my way through witnessing at thirteen years old. And now here I was - screaming, witnessing again.
I shouldn’t have had to relive any of it for him. I know that. But it just rolled off my tongue like too much water from the hose in summertime. It’s heartbreaking how trauma has its own tragic, jagged flow, like a scripted horror. And yet, sometimes it finds its way to another stream, a neutralizing, healing stream. That’s what I was looking for when I told Abe. Some relief, some understanding that would move us forward together, on one accord.
I know if I was honest about my love story on social media they’d rip me to shreds. What would The Movement have to say? Black Twitter? They wouldn’t get it and I cannot blame them one bit. But I could tell Abe was trying to get it, to get me. There was just a lifetime of privilege that needed to be penetrated.
He was teary-eyed by the end of it.
And then I went to Ferguson. And Ferguson turned me upside down.
And Abe changed even more. It wasn’t just a “I can see where you’re coming from” situation anymore. He was learning, finding his spot in this part of my world. He was doing his level best to get me right side up again. And he doesn’t know it but I saw the Google searches when he’d forget to close his laptop.
What are the major signs of depression?
How to console your partner after they’ve experienced trauma
How to help your partner cope with trauma
He called a couple of his therapist friends for tips on how to engage me without triggering me. And I’ll give it to them, they gave it their absolute Ivy League bubble best. Dr. Alana Silverman and Dr. Marie Green. Both white women in their 40s with fairly successful practices in Manhattan, they approached me like they would have any of their other clients. A mistake they either didn’t know they were making or were too arrogant to admit and course-correct. When you’ve pledged allegiance to your comfort, you cripple your ability to really help people holistically. They couldn’t help me because they refused to see all of me.
Some traumas are not like others. They’re longer and wetter and stickier and darker. Quicksand at night. They’ve got more potholes than can be deftly navigated in a few conversations. They’ve got stories the unprepared can’t fathom or finesse. Some traumas need whole-hearted healers.
After that first month of me saying next to nothing and eating less than that, Abe was consulting Twitter and books and some of my activist friends and colleagues whose life work is social justice and liberation. He was whispering in the hall while I pretended so hard to be napping that I eventually did fall asleep.
His Google searches got more detailed.
Therapy for racial trauma
Therapy for Black activists
Therapeutic practices for activists
Body work for Black trauma
How to be an ally to your Black activist partner
I have a Black woman therapist now and she sings my whole life with her words. Even the parts I don’t want to sing along to.
I’ve cut off a significant amount of my hair. There was no way almost four months of neglect could be combed smooth. I left enough for some fresh twists and I feel good enough to look at myself in the mirror now. I’ve gained four pounds and while it’s nowhere near the 20 I lost, it’s something.
Abe and I went to my mother’s church a few times and to a few near our apartment. I don’t know that he’ll make Jesus his Lord and Savior any time soon but he sees what a difference faith makes for me. A struggle though it may be some days.
It’s something about healing. When you can’t make your way to it, it finds its way to you.