Seasonal Thoughts
As I sit on my couch, cold hands—now turned numb from braiding my wet hair—grasp my book, Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez.
It’s so quiet.
So quiet I can hear the shuffle of my neighbor's jeans, as they make their way down the hall, rummaging in their bag to find their keys. I can hear cars zoom down the road and the wind swaying across our balcony. At moments it’ll get so quiet, I wonder if I’ve lost my hearing...if sound ceased to exist. The sun begins to fall a little lower, closer to the horizon. Bubble gum and pale skittles melting into its canvas, the sky.
I take a breath because I haven’t even made it to the first chapter. Tears form in my eyes as I read the title, "Montgomery 1973" because I think about the story of Civil, shared so eloquently by Dolen and, I think about the 70's secrets.
* * *
I think about the hidden history of what was done to people, people with coffee, caramel, colored, deeply pigmented skin, with bright minds, strong wills, and powerful cultures.
I think about the fact that 50 years time has passed since inhuman things took place to silence our mouths, crush our hopes, and tether our souls in private roundabout ways. Ways to depress and rid of brown skin.
I sit on my hands to warm them and think about writing how I feel because I know the words don’t come, unless my fingers do the talking.
I don’t know why, but this feeling—it’s not peace or happiness, nor sadness nor pain—but I know it is what Spring brings. It’s this cool and warm vibration that rings, that sits in my chest.
Nostalgia(?).
And you're probably wondering, and...how did we get to nostalgia? Well, because when I read the words 1973 it took me back to the time when there was less...for lack of a better word..."buzz" in the air.
Even growing up in the latter part of the 90s I remember how slow life was; how much space existed between time. Things felt more concrete, tangible, real (?), and steady (?) back then because you didn't have to see everything through a filtered screen; through society's new and improved rose-colored glasses.
Things just were.
I thought about my grandparents that passed. How during that time, they were living lives, young, and just moving through the world in their own rhythms.
How one day I'll be older too, thinking about this moment here, when I was young, 28, and beginning my dance to move to my rhythm in my space in time.
It brings me, comfort, straight to my heart—thinking about them. About my family so much younger than they are now; moving in life, dancing to their life, to their rhythms.
It's sweet, the comfort. But it's so sweet that it’s sad. It's sad because it creates this longing to stand in the past of now, lost time. Youth. To have back people who are no longer here. To ask them questions I wished to think of when they were present.
To be free from adult thoughts.
To see younger faces.
To understand the full story, having completed parts of the future. Nostalgia is so tough because it is not a happy feeling for me. It is wistful while so many I hear speak of it like a comforting hug. To me, it’s a hummed, constant yearning for something I will never obtain because there’s nothing I can do to bring any of the times or memories I have, back to life.
Sometimes I want a moment in memory, to relive it like taking the time to rewind a good part of a song on a cassette tape.
To go back in time and make connections to things I didn't understand with the mind and life experience I have now.
And, to sit still in pure moments of joy with people I can't connect with as often, or at all.
But now, I have to—well I guess we all have to—sit with that reality and move with time and propel forward with the gravity of life. And all this mix of emotions, of this need to chase nostalgia, these sweet dollops of life, exist at the same time as me feeling intrigued by the pull of my future. I feel ready to live into the person I’ve always wanted to grow to be.
What they always wanted to grow to be.
I want to be something great, even if it's something small. I want to find the rhythm of my steps. To find the purpose of my dance, for my ancestors. For those who moved through a time when living a life of choice and joy didn't exist for them.
That's what Montgomery 1973 brought to me.
And every Spring I feel the earth almost purging and growing and shifting and turning with me. Or really, I purge and grow and shift and turn with Her.
This book helped me realize the words I need to express that I'm feeling the need to bloom like the flowers and relive and rethink my purpose, to reconsider my steps into my rhythm of life. To reconfigure my form, my expression of dance. And, I think I'm just sensitive before things change. (I think I’ve always been.) I always know when my future begins to write another page within itself, based on, well I’m not sure. But I can usually tell when things are going to shift tremendously. And this doesn't worry me because I've learned that change doesn't have to be bad. No matter what is changing there is always a loss, and always a gain. (Sometimes it's a loss and a gain in areas you didn't expect...) Change comes with the creation and destruction of matter, of things.
The anticipation of when the change is coming, is I guess, what really jolts me. I’m coming into the future I’ve always dreamt of faster and faster, faster, and faster.
A future I feel is what my ancestors had always wanted, had envisioned for the coming generations.
As I’m cheering for my present self to reach the destination, I’m grieving my past self and all she’s seen, and felt, and been through. I'm grieving their past selves and all they've seen and felt and been through.
We're grieving all the time they spent with grime and grit. We're mourning their sweat, and tears, and joyfully rejoicing that their will to live through their calamity has led to success in generations today. Because all that they've done, was done so we can get where we are today.
I’m grieving their goals being met in other lifetimes. But I feel they cheer for me because we know I dance for them. We know when it's about time for me to add another step, to move to my rhythm of life, in my dance of purpose.
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