I was inside of my mind the other day. Saw my late father smack Sawyer upside the head. Saw my older brother retreat further behind his ribcage. There were times that he bared it – cleaved his cœur open like a plump clementine, split the sweet flesh between our new fingers. He did it where the light didn’t shine. He didn’t dare get caught with something like a sun in his chest. 

I knocked a crystal from the chandelier once, throwing a sock on laundry day. We would gather along the second story banister and toss down clumps of dirty clothes for Mommy to collect. Did I see the crystal shatter? I didn’t tell, either way. Something like a month later Sawyer ended up in the hospital with a foot infection. I knew it was me, I knew it was my fault. I was that accidental thorn in his side. I didn’t ask to be sharp, or whittled guilty. I tucked away a shame-secret at four years old, became acute. 

Shame first flashed its canines many times before I turned five. In preschool, I had the cherry-ist, slushiest crush on a little boy named Grant. A dark-skinned cherub with big eyes and a kind heart. A romantic since I could say, “I love you.” Since before then, even–on our first and only playdate, over the click of Legos, I confessed my adoration like pouring sweet, sticky honey over the playroom. I only like white girls, he said, but we can still be friends.

It’s more a vanishing of the heart than a breaking – a cold, ravenous disappearance. A quiet millennium. An eventual gathering of dust and particles. Later, some merciful and hot compression, and, finally, finally, light – an emanation. The lifecycle of a star, swirling in and ultimately out.

I touched that dark vacuum that evening, not my first time sharpening into a void. I collapsed into the night, Mommy rocked me home. Why am I not white? Why am I not white? I asked again and again and poured my heart out from my eyes. I don’t remember her answer. I don’t know that there’s one that could suffice for a little black girl who wants to peel off her skin – who has just learned that something undesirable exists on her surface. 

Though, Daddy had already taught me that – with an old leather belt and a quick elbow – that there was something on my surface to be punished. At three, I took a sharpie to the walls and drew in sun rays and starlight. I retrieved my parents in my flush of pride, and Daddy brought that void down hard on me. I cried out and out and reached for the door. We don’t pray into the core of things and speak to that interior nebula. We batter the flesh. We frighten the nervous system. We teach fear in lieu of understanding. We practice reaction in place of comprehension.

Where, then, might a preschooler go? How might she respond when her best friend decides on a winter Monday that she no longer wants a friend dressed in Black skin?

When you learn that you’ve been born into a stain, and that your birthright is punishment, you don’t flinch when Elizabeth pushes you, then scratches you in the face. You certainly don’t fight back. You peer out from way behind your eyes as a crowd of faces circles around your own, as hot blood cherry slushies the snow. You tuck the skin beneath her fingernails away into your memory, along with those old crystal shards and clementine peels.

Learn that your flesh is a sin and you’ll never stop repenting. Apologizing and forgiving. I’m sorry that I scared you. I forgive you for your blind fear. I forgive you for having to get to know me first. I’m sorry for my flesh-skin. I’m sorry it turned out this way. 

I’m sorry that we have to share a sidewalk. I forgive you for being quick to cross the street at night, but making no room for me to pass come day. I’m sorry that I think that you’d find a way to span the walkway if it were a mile wide – that you’d find some curb for me to step off of. I forgive you for failing to greet me when I enter your store. I forgive you for following me up and down each aisle – I get sorrier each time I look back over my shoulder. 

I’m sorry that the Earth is mine. I’m sorry that a crashing wave resembles my curls and that rich soil colors my flesh. I’m sorry that ripe fruit resembles my lips and that caramel sugars and spice and tree blood live in my eyes. I’m sorry that what you do to me reminds you of what you do to the Earth. I’m sorry that you live in fear and dream in envy. I am sorry that shame is your God and that cruelty is your prayer. And I forgive you for thinking that you’ve ever conquered anything.

It’s that apologetic forgiveness that kills the star. One chasing the other into nothingness, collapsing into apathy. Swirling into numbness yet returning to vitality, in time. Like a spiral that reverses itself at its apex. In the narrow part of the hourglass, time is infinite and frozen. Grief lives there: leather striking flesh; crystal splintering sole; fingernails peeling back Black skin. 

Love is the reversal, is that laughter resounding out from the vacuum. Is retrieving the splinter, is kissing over the lash, is cocooning oneself in skin as black as the universe and luminous as an oil slick. 

In pre-K, Daddy took me to a father-daughter dance and I never felt more like a princess. Mommy tucked tinsel into my hair and pinned flower petals across the lacey hemline of my dress. We danced through sparkle confetti and the cosmos and I wished that Sawyer was there with his sun to glitter our orbit.