42 days – hiatus.

Lately, I haven’t been writing. I wouldn’t call it a writer’s block, I just opted to observe for a little while. Take in all of my idleness, realizations, inspirations, let downs, conversations and moments in a different way. I just stored them for a day like today. I revisited my journal for the first time in over a month and let it spill. Things I’ve observed in 42 days:

• I must continue to learn to be happy with my happiness. It’s enough. It can always evolve, but my happiness is just that … it’s mine.
• People won’t ever understand how life can be enjoyable with being in a relationship, occupied with a person or in love at this “peak” in my life. Balance is achieved through introspection and taking the time out to be selfish and get to know yourself. Life has so many peaks, a lot at least one out to reach your prime of self-love.
• Silence is golden.
• My bed since I’ve been in China has been a puzzle piece to my peace.
• Take time to heal. I’ve had to continuously acknowledge my scars, some of them are fully healed and others I’m still tending time. All in due time.
• My body feels restored again. In every way. It speaks to me and I’ve been listening.
• Forgiveness is hard.
• Closure is necessary for me, but everything won’t conclude in peace. Often times, we have to make our own.
• The present is all we have. The past can no longer have power over all that I have.
• I am enough, always was.

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a surrealist you are.

if i loved you, i would try

to say all that i what i want to say

but i don’t.

so i am

intentionally silent

and

unapologetic

rising in the new skies, that are now real to me

you are

a figment of what could have been

surreal

so i be.

here, with me.

ascending past you like growing skyscrapers

like the ones that shield you every day

towering like fantasies

you admire their beauty

wanting to craft, create and conquer their stature

 afraid of heights

too timid to climb the scaffolds of another skyscraper because,

yours is not stable, still under construction

so you stay there

 in the limbo between growth and the ground

with moments of gumption and even more of doubt

you live in a comfort zone

staring at your reflection in the glass

the only thing that keeps you from falling down below

windows are  stained from your fingerprints because you are grasping for a grip

you say love sky scrapers

but if you loved them like you say you do

you would try to climb them, like you want to

but you don’t.

so you stand there

still

and unapologetic.

a love surreal.

pink, poised & peaceful.

sensitive soul.

So, everyone I know has asked me, “What have you learned so far in China?”.

I would always reply slightly predictable, but today I thought for a moment.

I have learned that I am a sensitive soul.

I have never strayed away from my compassion nor my emotional side, but I have never considered myself a “sensitive” person. When I was younger, my older brothers would constantly call me sensitive as a negative thing. But as I have grown, I have come to realize that sensitivity is a beautiful thing, especially when you yield yourself to it. In coming to a cautious stop when approaching your sensitiveness, you experience the boldness of things such as introspection, discovery, and love. Not romance, love.

Because I have sensitized myself to all that happens around me, smells, sounds, trying moments, times of loneliness, happiness and stillness,  my heart is refilling itself with love. For such a while, it was low on love. I tried numbing it with seeking freedom in oblivion, but in discovery, I have found myself, sensitive and secure.

We all have a delicacy that we must acknowledge. Do your heart the favor of nurturing its needs to let a little love in.

high-yella & blue black made caramel.

When I was a little girl my mother always told me she wanted two things that I had that she could never achieve, my thick, curly and dense hair texture and my caramel complexion. She wanted to have the experience of being a black woman who looked undoubtedly black with no questions asked. Her “high-yella” cheekbones and bone straight hair always left her drifting in between color lines although every thing about her was black. She never wanted me to fall victim to the color complexes that she was subjected to by others that she never believed in. So she always told me I was beautiful and made me feel like it to.

My father, dark skinned with seemingly all the melanin God could give one human being instilled the same values. He made sure to point out the brown skinned woman in a crowd and say to me, “Lakin, look how beautiful she is.” He always helped me to embrace my summer sun tans by encouraging me to wear all white and orange and yellows because they looked good on my new hue.

To me, my black was always beautiful.

So I find myself, in China, in the Eastern world so far away from all that I knew. There are no reflections of me on anything that I see except for a glass store window which reminds me of much I don’t blend in with any of my surroundings. Unless of course I’m alone, admiring the palm trees and gardens with not another person in sight. But in a such a densely populated country, outdoors I am never in my own company. In a place where my exterior is often misunderstood, admired, feared and kept at cautious distance due to booming ignorance and innocent curiosity.

So I thank my “high-yella” mother and my blue black father for coming together to tell me  that the caramel that they created was beautiful. Because even when I’m offered an umbrella to shield me from the sun, touched to see I’m covered in filth, stared at and I provoke a child to run away screaming as I walk by, I believe it.

I believe that my black is beautiful.

 

after a while.

when you’re far from home, after a while you begin to see that all those big things that you worried about were so small. your walk gets a little lighter and your strides a lot wider because you have have respect for where you step but you also have let everyone else know that you have some places to get to and discover.

after a while, you see that your fear of instability starts to fade right along with your ideals of success because those notions were built on norms that you’re defying just by taking a leap of faith and sleeping under a foreign sky. soon you realize that you’ll be sleeping alone at night for quite some time, and although it gets lonely, you’ll start to fall in love with the rhythm of your own heartbeat.

and that person back at home that you’re still attached to with dreamy intentions of maybe, possible and potentially of falling in love with once you’re in the same country code, they’ll be there if that’s where they are supposed to be. plain and simple. 

…and if not, of course, you’ll survive.

after a while, you develop an indifference to all things that revolve around material and lack substance and your passions will become brighter and brighter with new space in you’ve cleared out in your spirit.

…i’m sure i’ll learn more things, after a while.