Being There

It's been nine years since I first landed in Brooklyn, making a home out of a shoebox crib in Crown Heights that had walls full of rodents and bathwater hotter than the sun. Back then I had a different small group of friends (most of them college classmates) and a planner full of contacts that I'd amassed over ten years as a freelance scribe, academic achiever and Teen Summit posse member. I came here with a novel under my arm that every publisher said they didn't want, and the simple dream of getting myself a mid-level desk at VIBE Magazine. That was all that I wanted. Or at least that was what I was willing to settle for. I got a book deal in my first 12 months in town and had a desk in the online department at VIBE. Close enough. But God had other plans, whether I liked them or not.

Nine and a half years later I found myself sitting on a corner on broken concrete on the West Side highway, the sun falling from the sky just above the Hudson as countless cars scurried north and south in search pleasure pain and a good night's sleep. But I was there talking to God, trying to map out the next phase in a life far less ordinary than I had ever asked for it to be. Choosing this road less traveled brought me far more than I bargained for in lives both business and personal, hard lessons and the slew of sometimes crippling disappointments that are almost always a part of growing up.

I sat there fresh off of appearing in two different photo shoots, one by Jamel Shabazz and another by Lalalea and a small group of others, each meant to immortalize the current generation of successful artists living and working in Brooklyn, the place where I once dug my rabbit hole intending on a short stay only to realize that it felt more like a home for me than anywhere else. The fact that I even made it into those picture frames spoke volumes to what I had achieved in my creative life.
So as I sat there, taking in the streaks of orange in the sky above, I was also learning other lessons, things that had nothing to do with words, lines or phrases.

One of my favorite novels, Bright Lights, Big City, closes with the unnamed protagonist taking in the exact same view that my eyes were processing. The only difference was that there it was the approaching dawn that was the focus. It was that book more than anything else that made me want to live here. And there I was, sharing this same view and thinking some of the same thoughts, and texting the camera pic of shards of the sun to those who might understand its beauty while most were more concerning with dancing, drinking smoking and fucking their nights away. But I had done enough of that for several lifetimes, sweating through my clothes and sipping away the pain and crawling through the mornings after asking myself if it had been worth it. The time for that, in the way and why that I did it, has long since been over. While I once thought that I was the novice at a table full of experts, the truth is almost the complete reverse. They've just been better at pretending while performance has never really my thing.

Thinking back to the second of those shoots in Fort Greene Park, I thought of the words between a fellow scribe and myself, how after some times of relative conflict and ambiguity he paid me a compliment that I don't know if he would have all those years earlier when we both had a whole lot more to prove to the world and to ourselves about who we were. He encouraged me to look to the world stage for the next stage of my career, to Africa and beyond. As the names of nations had come to me in my dreams this made perfect sense. I have found my home, but there is always room for others.

There's always room for further change. I've spent too much time worrying about the wrong things, too much time trying to play games I had outgrown at birth. Real love is far less about the word as it is about the actions that embody it. Now that I know that the rest of it is so much easier.

Today marks 15 years since I rode at shotgun while my father drove like a madman with my stepmother in the backseat. I held her hand and took her through the breathing we had all learned as part of a La Maz class. 12 hours later they pulled my big little sister through a slit in her Mama's womb. She opened her eyes wide when she heard my voice, as if she remembered it from all those months in the inside when I would say things to her Mama's belly.

I was 17 and the only child of my parents. I had no idea of what being a big brother meant. But with every year it gets a little easier, as I watch her grow along with the trust we share. She will be a woman soon as I eventually became a man. And that makes me very very proud.

Shoutout to Mike Gonzales who also has a birthday today, and to my Grandma Sally who reached 87 on Friday, and to Chimene for showing me the Malaysian joint with the killer Pad Thai and curry chicken, and to the girl who loves Mah Jong, as life (like that game itself) has thrown her a bit of a curveball. After spending too much time hoping that the people upstairs might give the job to someone else I'm getting used to my chair in Major Crimes again. It feels a little better this time, a little more me, a little more like home. Out.