I feel a chunk of me die every time it happens.
George Floyd.
Breonna Taylor.
Sandra Bland.
Brandon Roberts.
Daunte Wright.
Each Black soul hand-plucked from their
bodies by a bullet or
by white hands is felt inside me.
I can feel their death as though it is mine.
I can feel the piercing of the bullet as it invasively
passes through their thin skin, muscle, veins, and bone.
Chewing and crunching anything that
gets in its way of taking their life.
I can feel the desperate inhale of their final breath
as the vowels and consonants get locked in their jaw
and scrape at their throat from choking on their own blood.
From suffocating on the denseness of fear.
I can feel the clogging of dirt and gravel in their fingernails
as they dig at the ground for one final touch with the earth.
For one last feeling of life.
For one last feeling of stability.
I feel all of this because this can so easily be me.
This fear crawls in me every time I walk by a police car.
Every time I see another “me” die.
It slithers in, entering from my eyes, and eventually finding its way to my brain. It wraps around tight, constricting logic and triggering survival, forcing me to “remember my place.”
Ultimately, the question remains:
how will I exist when chunks of me continue to die?