2022. the year in resistance…

I resisted death. I resisted self-harm. I resisted cigarettes (right up until the 361st day) and drugs and alcohol completely.

I resisted anger and resentment and the desire to wish harm on the people that have harmed me. Even those that did it on purpose. Even those that knew better and still did not do better. Even those who did not think I was worth doing better.

I resisted fear, even as fear made a home at the base of my spine, in the crook of my neck. I resisted love too because sometimes it asked so much of me and I did not believe I was up for the task. Who would you be if you truly believed you were up for the task? Who would you hold? Who would you release?

I resisted the pull of memory, down wells of trauma, through dark and lonely nights, where sometimes demons lay, and I am still seven years old and they still bare their teeth at me and I am still unprotected and I still must fend them off on my own, summoning the strength of all I have and all my ancestors have in me.

I resisted a world which tells me that I cannot be who I really am. Black. Queer. Sensitive. Angry. Confused. Unsure. Afraid. Audacious. Imperfect. Perfect. Beautiful. Broken. Unbreakable.

I resisted hate. Not my own but yours and hers and his. I resisted my own, too but maybe not as well. I resisted callousness and coldheartedness and unfeeling. I resisted shame over who I am. I resisted shame over who we are.

I resisted sleep. It snuck up on me all throughout the day, asking me for my hand, inviting me to dance, playing music soft and warm, tickling the folds of my ears, caressing my lashes, begging me to come join. I resisted and resisted and then did not resist.

I resisted loneliness. I made love to him and it was like making love to myself, grazing my eyelashes, fluttering on the folds of my skin, planting caresses in the earth of my own body, raising blooms and summoning crops to feed the small army that lives in in the space between my kisses and my cries. I resisted making love to him again.

I resisted the night, shooing it away like an annoying relative, clinging to the days like they owed me money, even as they shrank and slunk their way into winter, fading in the late afternoon against the cold, naked moon.

I resisted the end. Holding on for dear…life? Even after dear life proved that it might be better held elsewhere. I resisted the truth. That it is perhaps not safe for me here. That this is not the place where I am loved in the way that my ancestors dreamed for me to be loved. They dreamed of something better, I feel. I can only know it in the quiet moments, in the poetry that is blowing across my eyebrows on the cool northern winds outside tonight.