The days are flying past my face like pigeons—the negroes of the bird world. I can hardly recall what I have done anything for or what my life is about as if my internal hard drive has been wiped clean. Data gone. Nothing there. Factory reset. I grasp for understanding yet crumble like aimless shards of sand on Cherry Beach. The unknown has taken me entirely. Even writing to you now feels impossible. I assume these paragraphs will provoke a sense of self but what if this abyss is my new normal?
The essence of my now is bleak—gobbled up and swallowed whole by my desires such that I am covered in the mess of its esophagus as I recline on a comfortable coach foreign to me, observing a gradient of grey clouds both take and lose form easterly and southerly across the Canadian sky. The desperation to know myself has become a prison. I yearn to move through this season with gratitude and grace but sense something more subterranean afoot.
I feel so much pressure to keep growing my business even though I have $7 in my bank account. No amount of good work and integrity will keep the lights on. That’s why I have solar panels now. I bought a meal and overdrew my credit card to fill up my gas tank and somehow, I don’t want to die over it. I sometimes wonder if poverty is inextricably linked with Blackness. I personally don’t know any Black people who have loads of cash. They probably keep it a secret for protection.
Never having enough makes me think of how being poor lives in the bones. How the excess of sometimes doesn’t cover the cost of never. How no amount is enough unless you have enough. How marrying up doesn’t alleviate the scarcity. What makes this reality bearable is being rich in spirit and even that is a fluke.
I think people generally assume I have money because of the way I present online. And then I wonder, are we all making money off each other’s pain? I recently let a friend know it angered me that they aired out our conflict on their 60,000 follower Instagram account. They proceeded to launch a year long course on their Substack off the back of our rupture a week later. Will I receive any royalties from this? Probably not.
I’m having a huge idk moment and instead of running away from it, I am sitting in the cauldron of it. Letting the uncertainties melt down the silk screen of my performance. I don’t know why I decided to put out this album that I genuinely can’t afford to release but here we are. Doing things, regretting them later and hoping to befriend some peace (or an advance) in the process.