I hate this day more than most days on the calendar. It is the one and only day in my life I hate being from NY.
Today is the only day everyone ever wants to talk about. Where were you?
What were you doing?
They want you to tell them someone you loved was in those buildings and they stare, wide-eyed waiting for the details…
so they can weaponize my browness against me when they say in response, “But doesn’t this prove the borders needed to close?”
As if borders even work this way…
I never make eye contact on today.
I never bother telling them I’m indigenous to these lands. Nor could I ever hope to explain that NY is so much a part of who I am,
this day, scarred me, like those planes scarred my Beautiful city irreparably
and
for life and I watched, in horror, as they used this day to change us into something
even less free…
I can’t explain, they wouldn’t care so,
I never bother to tell them the trauma of it all cos one can’t understand unless one was there
and whatever trauma came from that day they hope to weaponize *that* too.
I hate today.
Today everyone shakes their head and clicks their tongue in something mimicking sympathy.
Asking, “Why can’t we be safer?” While going out of their way to
deliberately make Brown people feel less welcome and unsafe here than usual.
On land that’s not theirs….
Today has become another day for white people to “celebrate” this “great” country
And all our independence, memorials, Thanksgiving all roll up and happen on today too, as they pretend to mourn a city they’ve policed the life out of
It’s just another day to
blindly romanticize America, the land of the “free” to shoot a Black man in his own home “mistakenly”
On land that’s not theirs
While worshipping a bloody flag that only covers parts of us
the ugly ones.
Its all gross propaganda anyway, disguised as patriotism disguised as America
the biggest terrorist of them all.
Brown Girls Out Loud 