Photo by @nycfoodblog
I am thinking about you, the art personified.
You are the thing I resisted most coming into my life. I said no, I want to be a dancer, I want the air to hug my hips and to stretch my legs for miles. I said no, I want to be a swimmer, let the chlorine water engulf me and slap at my skin. I wanted to be anything but a martial artist.
My first class with you, I was trembling. I was rolling down those mats, scraping my skin against the friction, wondering when this whole process would cease. I felt unbearably sweaty and trapped in my clothing and inside myself.
My braid was grabbed, my body contorted, boys both stronger and weaker than I tousled together in simulated bloodshed, trying to escape unseen things. I felt trapped within myself, and isolated around myself. I hated you. You were my keeper and you led me with the way of the iron rod.
At school they called me gorilla. You helped turn me into a caricature of something I never wanted to be. You awoke in me the confirmation that at birth, I was wrongly placed. I was supposed to be a boy, and grow into a man. I was to box my emotions in the secret recesses of the heart, hollow out my belly, and furrow my brow. I was to be as stoic and wrathful as the men who raised me. In the quiet solitude of my mind, I wanted to be the slender and the weak. I wanted to be the fragile swan looked upon by yearning gaze and ransacked. I wanted my hair pulled and my skin cracked. I wanted to fight everyone, I wanted to fight my father, I wanted to fight you, but mostly, I wanted to fight myself. I wanted to wreck myself, toss myself into the dirt until nothing soft remained.
You were disgusting to me, this thing of such taboo. Why was I forced into your world and what purpose did you serve besides taking my voice from me? You shackled me in the coarse material you called yourself. You made me sweat and heave and bleed. You spilled my tears onto the floor of my own home as you caught me hand over hand like predator to prey.
I told him I didn’t want you anymore. I told him I needed to stop. You were the source of all that was taking from my life and he said no. He said as long as you live here you will follow my rules, you will bear my burden and my sadness and my rage, just as I bear it today. I was bound to you, and even in my quietest moments of desperation you and I were linked and hardwired into my brain and into my soul.
And then I got to understand you.
Our relationship started off because I didn’t want to know you and you didn’t want to have me. You wanted a man, wrapped in thick cord and gristle. You wanted a keeper of the bloodline you were conditioned to follow.
And I became your dark horse. Your rogue. Your wildcard. The underdog of underdogs, not fitting the mold of any country, any culture, any family, affiliation or allegiance. I was born to be the outsider. A woman, thick with honey and quiet with fury, tall as the buildings outside and seemingly built from the mortar of this Earth. I did not share a noble lineage, or even a common one. At first, I rejected my womanhood, looked at it as the pest that I could not shed, the magnet for physical pests that would come in the night and attack with lips pulled back against their bright red gums, baring bone against bone.
Then I fully immersed myself. If I was to wear the badge I would learn to understand it, and to cultivate it. I would learn what it meant to carry the worth of suffering and use you to be outspoken about it. You would be my vessel towards evolution. You were my platform, you were my soapbox to stand on. You were my introduction to those around me that would sneer when they smiled, who would hold my hand waiting to let go when the fall inevitably came.
They rejected me many times, and it wouldn’t have mattered had I also not rejected myself. But you were always ready to accept me into your world, with arms open wide and ready for embrace. The ones calling themselves your people were angry, bound by the rage that brought them to your home and your doorstep in the first place. Sadness, abuse, victimhood, fighting for restoration and reparation but still all masked with wrath.
The people who claimed to be your sons and daughters, many of them turned their faces up at the sight of me. I wasn’t quiet. I hated the loyalty devotionism, the discrimination, the performative quality of it all. A staged tragedy we all pretended to be our organic reality. I was searching for truth amidst it all because I was starting to find my truth within you and around you. I wanted to emerge along your most developed disciples. They did not want to hear what I had to say, for their minds were long closed. Instead of honoring you and bowing to your knowledge, they bowed to themselves in worship of the ego.
And yet throughout all the chaos and turmoil, you never stopped accepting. You made it your mission to envelop me in the love of all those who matched me in spirit and candor. You wanted me to fight for and establish my tribe among all the bullshit and all the drivel.
You gave me the gift of discipline, of patience and of peace. When I lost and was berated, you sent someone to me with golden heart and golden arms to tell me, with love that only comes from personal destruction, that it would all be okay. You gave me access to supporters compelled to uplift me. You force me out of my comfort zone, force me to stare at myself in the mirror and tell myself I belong. I told you I wanted to keep quiet and you told me to speak. Then you put me up on a stage and you told me to speak up even louder.
In all my times of struggling to know how I am, you were there reminding me that it was okay not to know and that healing was a never-ending feat.
So now, 14 years after meeting you, having known you longer than half my life, I say thank you for all that you’ve done, and all that we will continue to do together.