Slaps.

I’ve given a few of em. Been slapped too.

The first time I remember slapping someone was in elementary school. I don’t recall at this moment if it was Margo Burley or Brittany Hamlet I slapped first, but they both received a powerful blow from the back of my young black hand. A good friend of mine Rev. Miya King, said to me one day over the phone (after recounting to her my latest domestic violence situation) that “sometimes some people need to be slapped.” I wholly agreed. But as I sit here today, recently slapped by my mother— not actually, just emotionally— which led me to imagining myself assaulting her with a slap as she no doubt did to me first, which is directly related to me slapping those first young women in primary school. I didn’t react the same today, though. I thought about physically violating someone instead of actually doing it.

As I unpack this, this cycle of violence, the root causes, the chicken or the egg— at my mothers house, my sudden hold over fortress during dem a panic— I learn a thing or two about motherhood, tough love and the forced ideas of mothering. The generation that my mother belongs to is one timecapsule from the 70s locked in fashionable complaints common to the evening news. A herd-generation who raised a free-thinking generational sect that I belong to, are now still roaming around us, driving the earthship into ruins because they refuse to stop buying bottled whatever, and know for certain that their ideas on things are running out of relevance in todays society. This point in pausing commercially-globally, to normalize new world orders, has now fallen into our laps and its beauty weighs equally in ugliness.

I see this ugliness in the disposition of the people I intersect with.

I watch her/they/them, watch the news, the reality shows, the series. They Zoom in to church on Sundays, Bible Study on Wednesdays. They scroll Instagram, the high school reunion group. They dream of vacationing in other countries. Memories told over and over again of times that were different. Things I take for granted when they upset me. They close the door to me most nights. I feel so different from them. I pull away from the similarities because they aren’t all favorable to me. They feel this and withdraw too. I push for them to voice their insecurities so that I may feel free to voice mine. But we rarely hold that space for one another. We don’t know how to care for each other properly.

So we suffer in silence and in emotional swells.

I listen to the things they say to me when they are upset. I watch how those moments erupt.

I hear the things I say to them.

What am I trying to convey? I always re-ask myself. Often, I am disappointed with my lack of creativity or my lack of humor in the moment. 

Was I creative when I lacked care to talk about what upset me and slapped someone? Was I creative in the style of violence or the expression of anger? What counts? What can be changed?